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THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 



THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

A BRIEF APPRECIATION 



BY 
WILLIAM ARCHER 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1919 



Copyright, 1919, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



FeS,26 19l9 

THE QUINN tc BODEN CO. PRESS 

RAHVVAV N. J. 



©CI.A5L1739 



err 



NOTE 

For the early career of President Wilson^ the chief 
authority is Mr. William B. Hale's " Woodrow Wilson: 
The Story of His Life " (1912). Excellent studies 
of his work as an educator and a statesman will he 
found in Mr. Henry J. Ford's " Woodrow Wilson: 
The Man and His Work'' (1916), and (from the 
British point of view) in Mr. H. Wilson Harris's 
" President Wilson: His Problems and Policy " (1917), 
To all three books I am greatly indebted. 

W.A. 



INTRODUCTORY 

The United States of America have passed 
through two great crises of history — the crisis 
which gave them birth as an independent nation, 
and the crisis which decided that they were to 
remain for ever one and indivisible, and that 
negro slavery was no longer to be tolerated 
within their bounds. Each of these crises 
brought to the front a man, not only of lofty 
spiritual stature, but of the purest order of 
greatness. George Washington was not, per- 
haps, what is accounted a man of genius. His 
powers were solid rather than dazzling. A 
splenetic Scotch sophist could, without manifest 
absurdity, sneer at him as merely " a good land- 
surveyor." But he had what the crisis de- 
manded more than brilliancy of genius: he had 
greatness of character. Never was polity more 
fortunate than the United States in its founder 
and patron saint. Abraham Lincoln, on the 
other hand, was a man of genius if ever there 
was one; yet what endears his name to his 

vii 



vlii INTRODUCTORY 

countrymen, and to all lovers of freedom 
throughout the world, is not his genius but his 
sheer goodness. The rugged frontiersman, the 
Illinois country lawyer, was a nobleman in the 
highest sense of the word. The people of 
America were much wiser than they realized 
when they sent that long, lean, ungainly 
Westerner to the White House. Yet we cannot 
but believe that some sort of happy instinct 
guided the democracy in making so brilliant a 
selection. 

In August, 1914, a third great crisis found, as 
some of us believe, a third great man in the 
presidential chair of the United States. The 
issue in this crisis was an entirely new one; not 
whether the nation should be independent, not 
whether it should be indivisible, but whether it 
should attempt to hold aloof from the shaping 
of the world's future, in fancied inviolabihty, or 
should accept the share in that momentous task 
imposed on it at once by its strength and by its 
ideals. There was much that was specious, and 
much that carried the weight of high authority, 
to be said in favor of the former alternative. 
The question simply was whether America 
should realize that the world of to-day was an 



INTRODUCTORY ix 

entirely different world from that in which the 
tradition of aloofness was established, and that 
her national ideals of peace and democracy were 
as formidably menaced by events in Europe as 
though the Atlantic Ocean had been no broader 
than the Straits of Dover. 

The President in office when that crisis burst 
upon the world had been elected on wholly dif- 
ferent issues. But once more fortune had 
marvelously favored the United States. He 
proved to be a man in whom the wisdom of 
patience was no less conspicuous than the wis- 
dom of courage. So long as it seemed that 
American ideals might be safeguarded, and the 
future of the world secured, without the active 
participation of his country in the vast calamity 
of war, he held his hand, he disregarded the 
clamor of impatient spirits on either side of the 
ocean, and he awaited the time when either the 
skies should clear, or they should so darken that 
not even the most ostrich-like optimism could 
imagine the United States unthreatened by the 
tornado. Meanwhile the American people had, 
in a hotly-contested election, reaffirmed its belief 
that the man they had chosen in calmer times, 
and in view of simpler problems, was the strong 



X INTRODUCTORY 

man whose hand was required on the helm of 
the ship of state. 

The skies, as we know, did not clear — they 
grew ever more lowering — and as soon as the 
moment came when the interests of the nation 
and of the world manifestly demanded that 
counsels of patience should give place to coun- 
sels of resolution, Woodrow Wilson spoke un- 
hesitatingly the decisive word, and found a 
united people behind him. Is it premature to 
recognize in his whole course of action an ex- 
ample of lofty and intrepid statesmanship, 
justly comparable with anything recorded of his 
two great predecessors? May not one even go 
further, and say that never did crisis in history 
find, or produce, a man more splendidly ade- 
quate to the task imposed upon him? 

For the past two years, no living man has 
held a more conspicuous or a more responsible 
position than Mr. Wilson. All the world has 
hung upon his utterances; and to all lovers of 
freedom and justice — to all whose one consola- 
tion in calamity has been the hope that the 
world would profit by the awful lesson — his 
utterances have been a constant source of in- 
spiration and of confidence. His idealism, on 



INTRODUCTORY xi 

the one hand, has never faltered, while on the 
other hand his sane sense of the practical needs 
of the situation has never failed. To millions 
of people in allied, in neutral, and even in 
enemy countries, the knowledge that this strong, 
just man had his hand on the levers of state- 
craft has given inexpressible reassurance. 

Since the great turn of fortune in July, 1918 — 
since the Landshde of Autocracy set in — Mr. 
Wilson's position has been unique and unpar- 
elleled. In virtue of the mandate of a great 
people: in virtue, too, of his own character and 
faculty: he has at more than one juncture been 
in very truth the arbiter of the destinies of 
the world. In the name of democracy, he has 
spoken the doom of empires. To this man of 
plain Scotch-Irish parentage, this son of an 
obscure Presbyterian minister, Hapsburgs and 
Hohenzollerns have come truckling for mercy, 
only to be told, calmly and sternly, that man- 
kind has no longer any use for them. The 
wonderful, the incredible drama is a theme for 
an ^schylus or a Shakespeare. We, its living 
spectators, can find no adequate words for the 
emotion it excites in us. 

But the career and character of its protago- 



xii INTRODUCTORY 

nist we can and must study. Difficult though 
it be to see a contemporary in just perspective, 
this is a case in which the attempt must be made. 
The purpose of the following pages is to give, 
in the briefest compass, a sketch of the career 
and character of the man to whom we owe the 
inspiring spectacle of a great nation accepting, 
from motives of pure world-patriotism, the 
gravest responsibility which a people can take 
upon itself, and throwing its weight, at the 
decisive instant, into the most momentous war 
of the modern world. 

The earlier and less widely-known stages of 
the President's career have been more fully 
treated than the later, which are matters of 
recent history. Wherever it has seemed possi- 
ble, Mr. Wilson has been left to tell his own 
story, through extracts from his writings and 
speeches. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTEK 






PAGE 


I. 


Youth and Early Manhood . . . 1 


II. 


The Man of Letters 






9 


III. 


Princeton . . . , 






28 


IV. 


New Jersey 






39 


V. 


The White House . 






. 49 


VI. 


Mexico .... 






. 73 


VII. 


Into the War . 






. 82 


VIII. 


Peace and the League of Nations 


. 109 




Appendix . . . ... 




■ 


. 115 



THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 



YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD 

Thomas Woodrow Wilson — the " Thomas " 
seems soon to have been dropped by general eon- 
sent — was born at Staunton, Virginia, on De- 
cember 28, 1856. His paternal grandfather, 
James Wilson, emigrated from Ulster in 1807, 
and married, in Philadelphia, Anne Adams, an 
Ulster girl who had been among his fellow- 
passengers. He went westward, about 1812, to 
Steubenville, Ohio, and there a son, Joseph 
Ruggles — the youngest of seven — was born to 
him in 1822. All the seven sons learned their 
father's trade, and became printers; but the 
transition from printing to journalism was easy, 
and James Wilson founded two papers, the 
Western Herald in Steubenville, and the Penn- 



2 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

sylvania Advocate in Pittsburg, both of which 
remained in his possession till his death in 1857. 
His youngest son soon dropped the family trade 
in order to enter the Presbyterian ministry. 
Though licensed as a preacher, he at first de- 
voted himself mainly to teaching, and in 1846 
obtained a post in the Male Academy at his 
birthplace, Steubenville. There he met Miss 
Janet Woodrow, daughter of the Rev. Dr. 
Thomas Woodrow, a Scotch Presbyterian min- 
ister, who had crossed the Border to Carlisle, 
where his family of eight were all born. From 
Cumberland they removed to Canada, and 
thence to Ohio. His daughter Janet was a 
pupil at the Steubenville Academy for Girls 
when she made the acquaintance of Joseph 
Wilson. They were married on June 7, 1849. 
The future President was their third child, but 
eldest son. Another son was born ten years 
later. 

Joseph Wilson seems to have been a man 
of varied attainments, for we find him acting at 
one time as " professor extraordinary " of 
rhetoric at one Southern college; shortly after- 
wards as professor of chemistry and natural 
science at another; and later as professor of 



YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD 3 

pastoral and evangelistic theology at a third. 
He also took pastoral charge of various 
churches. From 1858 to 1870 he was pastor of 
the First Presbyterian Church of Augusta, 
Georgia; and it was in this town of some 15,000 
people that the young Woodrow spent his child- 
hood and early boyhood. The great Civil War 
never came very near to the quiet household. 
It no doubt caused both perturbations and 
privations, but does not seem to have left any 
deep impression on the boy's mind. His ear- 
liest memory, however, is of " two men meeting 
in the street outside his father's house, and one 
of them declaring ' Lincoln is elected, and 
there'U be war.' " 

The chief effect of the war upon Woodrow's 
personal fortunes was to retard the beginning 
of his education. It is scarcely credible that, in 
a literate household, a highly intelligent boy 
passed the age of nine before he was even able 
to read; but it is certain that until he was four- 
teen the only school he attended was one opened 
in Augusta by one J . T. Derry, a Confederate 
veteran whose qualifications do not seem to 
have been of the highest. Meanwhile his taste 
for literature was fostered by the domestic habit 



4 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

of reading aloud, which introduced him to the 
works of Scott and Dickens, among other 
authors. 

In 1870 the family removed to Columbia, 
South Carolina, where Woodrow went to the 
local academy. Three years later he entered 
Davidson College, North Carolina, but after a 
year's attendance his health temporarily broke 
down. His family had now removed to Wil- 
mington, North Carolina, and there he spent a 
year of comparative rest, at the same time pre- 
paring himself for entrance to Princeton Uni- 
versity, where he matriculated in September, 
1875. Up to this point, that is to say, until 
his nineteenth year, his whole life had been 
spent in the Southern States. 

His academic record at Princeton was credita- 
ble but not brilliant. We are told that " his 
general average for the four years was 90.3," 
which may strike the uninitiated as rather good ; 
but it is added that " he stood thirty-eighth in 
a graduating class of 106." His literary ability, 
however, did not fail to make its mark, and he 
was for a year sole editor of the college maga- 
zine, the Princetonian. He was reckoned 
among the best speakers in the Whig Hall de- 



YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD 5 

bating club. On one occasion he was chosen 
to represent Whig Hall in a debate with an- 
other society, on a subject to be picked at 
random from among a number thrown into a 
hat. The subject drawn was " Tariffs," and it 
should have been Wilson's part to plead the 
cause of Protection against Free Trade. But 
he would not, even as an academic exercise, 
argue against his convictions. He retired from 
the debate, and the champion chosen in his 
place was defeated. This incident shows a 
remarkable earnestness in so young a man. 
Paradox — a deliberately insincere display of in- 
tellectual adroitness — has usually irresistible at- 
tractions for the clever undergraduate. 

Before he left college, Wilson contributed to 
the International Review a remarkable article 
on " Cabinet Government in the United States," 
which " contains in embryo much of his subse- 
quent thinking and writing upon Government." 
Already he is concerned about the lack of an 
efficient connecting-link, in the American con- 
stitution, between the legislative and the execu- 
tive, and urges that such a link would be sup- 
phed by a responsible Cabinet. The following 
passage was repeated almost word for word in 



6 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

many of his campaign speeches during the 
Presidential Election of 1912: 

Congress is a deliberative body in which there is little 
real deliberation; a legislature which legislates with no 
real discussion of its business. Our Government is 
practically carried on by irresponsible committees. 
Too few Americans take the trouble to inform them- 
selves as to the methods of Congressional management; 
and as a consequence, not many have perceived that 
almost absolute power has fallen into the hands of men 
whose irresponsibility prevents the regulation of their 
conduct by the people from whom they derive their 
authority. 

Already the future President was deeply in- 
terested in English political thought. He had 
read Chatham, Burke, Brougham, Macaulay 
and especially Bagehot, for whom his admira- 
tion was unbounded. Moreover, through the 
running commentary in the Gentleman's Maga- 
zine, he had familiarized himself with the par- 
liamentary history of the sixties and seventies, 
when Gladstone and Disraeli were at the height 
of their fame. Already the bent of his mind 
was consciously and definitely political. The 
vital things of literature interested him pro- 
foundly, but for antiquarianism he had neither 



YOUTH AND EARLY MANHOOD 7 

taste nor time. He refused to compete for a 
prize of $125 which it was thought he might 
easily have won, because he found that it would 
have involved a close study of the works of Ben 
Jonson. 

After taking his degree of A.B. in 1879, 
Wilson studied law for a year at the University 
of Virginia, Charlottesville. Here we find him 
delivering an oration on John Bright, and con- 
tributing to the college magazine an article on 
Gladstone. His health again becoming unsatis- 
factory, he spent a year at home, before entering 
upon the profession he had chosen, and estab- 
lishing himself as a lawyer at Atlanta, Georgia. 
Fortunately, as we are now apt to think, he 
waited for clients in vain; and in 1883 he left 
Atlanta to enter upon a post-graduate course 
at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Here 
he obtained a fellowship in history, and, by 
means of a thesis on " Congressional Govern- 
ment," the degree of Ph.D. In 1885 he joined 
the teaching staff of Bryn Mawr, a famous 
college for women, then newly established in the 
outskirts of Philadelphia, where he lectured on 
history and political economy. From 1888 to 
1890 he held the Professorship of History in the 



8 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. 
In 1890 he returned to Princeton as Professor 
of Jurisprudence and Politics, and at Princeton 
he remained for twenty years. He had married 
in 1885 Miss Ellen Louise Axon, of Savannah, 
Georgia. This lady — whom he had thanked in 
more than one dedication for " gentle benefits 
which can neither be measured nor repaid " — 
died in August, 1914, just as the storm of war 
burst upon the world. In December, 1915, Mr. 
Wilson married Mrs. Norman Gait, formerly 
Miss Edith Boiling, of Wythesville, Virginia. 



II 

THE MAN OF LETTERS 

The years of his professorship at Princeton — 
before he entered upon the organizing and ad- 
ministrative duties of a University President — 
were the chief years of Woodrow Wilson's 
hterary activity. How significant, and how full 
of promise, that activity was, we have scarcely 
realized on this side of the Atlantic. 

His authorship falls into three branches: he 
is a writer upon political science, he is an his- 
torian, and he is an essayist. In all three 
branches his work is full of character and vital- 
ity. He brings to it a vigorous and compre- 
hensive mind, fine literary culture, high ideals, 
and a broad, sympathetic humanity. He shows 
himself from the first an accomplished writer, 
trained in the only good school — that is to say, 
a loving study of the best models in the lan- 
guage. Those of us who made our first ac- 



10 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

quaintance with his style in reading diplomatic 
" notes " presumed to proceed from his pen, 
may have thought it somewhat cumbrous and 
conventional. No epithets could be less applica- 
ble to his unofficial and unfettered literary work. 
The inference is either that, in his diplomatic 
documents, some other hand actually held the 
pen, or that he was trammeled by the sense 
that in such communications anything like indi- 
viduality or lightness of touch would be out of 
place. 

His first book was the Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity thesis, "Congressional Government: A 
Study in American Politics," * published when 
he was twenty-eight. Seldom has so unromantic 
a theme inspired so readable a book. One learns 
from it not only the forms of the machinery 
which has grown up for expressing in practice 
the theories of the American Constitution, but 
also, by way of contrast, a good deal about the 
workings of the British parliamentary system. 
For Mr. Wilson is above everything a student 
of comparative politics, and never loses sight of 
the intimate relationship between American and 

* Called in the English edition (Constable, 1914), "A Study of 
the American Constitution." 



THE MAN OF LETTERS 11 

British institutions. Of the actual style of the 
book, a few brief specimens must suffice: 

Hamilton and Jefferson did not draw apart because 
the one had been an ardent and the other only a luke- 
warm friend of the Constitution, so much as because 
they were so different in natural bent and temper that 
they would have been like to disagree and come to drawn 
points wherever or however brought into contact. The 
one had inherited warm blood and a bold sagacity, 
while in the other a negative philosophy ran suitably 
through cool veins. They had not been meant for yoke- 
fellows. 

How excellent an expression is that which I 
have italicized! There is a touch of Stevenson 
about it. 

The House sits, not for a serious discussion, but to 
sanction the conclusions of its Committees as rapidly 
as possible. It legislates in its committee-rooms ; not 
by the determinations of majorities, but by the resolu- 
tions of especially-commissioned minorities; so that it 
is not far from the truth to say that Congress in session 
is Congress on public exhibition, while Congress in its 
committee-rooms is Congress at work. 

I know not how better to describe our form of 
government in a single phrase than by calling it a 
government by chairmen of the Standing Committees 
of Congress. This disintegrate ministry, as it figures 



12 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

on the floor of the House of Representatives, has many 
peculiarities. 

One must take this passage in its full context 
in order quite to appreciate the admirable felicity 
of " disintegrate ministry." 

Some of the Committees are made up of strong men, 
the majority of them of weak men; and the weak are 
as influential as the strong. The country can get the 
counsel and guidance of its ablest representatives only 
upon one or two subjects; upon the rest it must be 
content with the impotent service of the feeble. Only 
a very small part of its important business can be done 
well ; the system provides for having the rest of it done 
miserably, and the whole of it taken together done at 
haphazard. 

Indirect taxes off^end scarcely anybody. . 
They are very sly, and have at command a thousand 
successful disguises. . . . Very few of us taste the 
tariff in our sugar; and I suppose that even very 
thoughtful topers do not perceive the license-tax in 
their whisky. There is little wonder that financiers 
have always been nervous in dealing with direct but 
confident and free of hand in the laying of indirect 
taxes. 

Executive and legislature are separated by a hard 
and fast line, which sets them apart in what was meant 
to be independence, but has come to amount to isolation. 



THE MAN OF LETTERS 13 

It is natural that orators should be the leaders of a 
self-governing people. Men may be clever and engaging 
speakers . . . without being equipped even tolerably 
for any of the high duties of the statesman; but men 
can scarcely be orators without that force of character, 
that readiness of resource, that clearness of vision, 
that grasp of intellect, that courage of conviction, that 
earnestness of purpose, and that instinct and capacity 
for leadership, which are the eight horses that draw 
the triumphal chariot of every leader and ruler of free 
men. "" 

Our English cousins have worked out for themselves 
a wonderfully perfect scheme of government by prac- 
tically making their monarchy unmonarchical. They 
have made of it a republic steadied by a reverenced 
aristocracy, and pivoted upon a stable throne. . . . 
I think that a philosophical analysis of any successful 
and beneficent system of self-government will disclose 
the fact that its only effectual checks consist in a mix- 
ture of elements, in a combination of seemingly contra- 
dictory political principles; that the British govern- 
ment is perfect in proportion as it is unmonarchical, 
and ours safe in proportion as it is undemocratic. 

" Congressional Government " was an essay in 
criticism rather than a work of systematic exposi- 
tion. Mr. Wilson followed it up four years later 
(1889) with a much solider, though scarcely- 
more valuable, contribution to political science. 



U THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

This was entitled "The State: Elements of His- 
torical and Practical Politics," and was, in fact, 
a text-book which had grown up out of the 
material collected for his Princeton lectures. It 
was a pioneer work, so far, at any rate, as the 
English language is concerned. " In preparing 
it," said Mr. Wilson in his preface, " I labored 
under the disadvantage of having no model. So 
far as I was able to ascertain, no text-book of 
like scope and purpose had hitherto been at- 
tempted." Its all-embracing " scope " may be 
gathered from its table of contents: 

I. The Earliest Forms of Government. 

II. The Governments of Greece. 

III. The Government of Rome. 

IV. Roman Dominion and Roman Law. 

V. Teutonic Polity and Government during the 

Middle Ages. 

VI. The Government of France. 

VII. The Governments of Germany. 

VIII. The Governments of Switzerland. 

IX. The Dual Monarchies: Austria-Hungary; 

Sweden, Norway. 

X. The Government of Great Britain. 

XI. The Government of the United States. 

XII. Summary: Constitutional and Administrative 

Developments. 



THE MAN OF LETTERS 15 

XIII. The Nature and Forms of Government. 

XIV. Law: its Nature and Development. 

XV. The Functions of Government. 

XVI. The Objects of Government. 

In view of this multiplicity of topics, it is 
scarcely surprising to find that the book runs to 
1,586 paragraphs, and (in the English Edition) 
to 639 pages. In introducing the Enghsh edition 
of 1899, Mr. Oscar Browning wrote: 

Scholars well qualified to judge are of opinion that 
in coming years the interest now taken in Economics 
will be shared with Political Science. Whenever that 
Science is regarded not only as indispensable to an his- 
torian, but as the very backbone to Historical Study, 
Mr. Wilson will be considered as the foremost, if not 
the first, of those who rendered possible an intelligent 
study of a department of Sociology, upon which the 
happiness and good government of the human race 
essentially depend. 

How little did Mr. Browning think, as he 
wrote these words, that the man whose theoretical 
work he thus appreciated, would be the executive 
leader of his hundred-million countrymen in a 
crisis in which the " happiness and good govern- 
ment of the human race " were indeed the issue 



16 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

at stake, and would lead them warily, judiciously, 
and yet resolutely, in the paths of far-seeing and 
disinterested world-citizenship. 

Mr. Wilson's chief work as a historian is his 
" History of the American People." It first 
appeared, in part at any rate, as a series of arti- 
cles in Harper's Magazine, entitled " Colonies 
and Nation." In its final form — five large vol- 
umes, profusely and excellently illustrated — it 
does for the United States what the illustrated 
edition of Green's " Short History " does for 
Britain. Mr. Wilson's style is as well adapted 
for narrative as for exposition. Despite its brev- 
ity, the opening paragraph of his second chapter, 
" The Swarming of the English," is suflficient to 
show that, no more than Macaulay, Froude or 
Green, does he forget that history, while it may 
or may not be a branch of science, is assuredly a 
branch of literature: 

It was the end of the month of April, 1607, when 
three small vessels entered the lonely capes of the 
Chesapeake, bringing the little company who were to 
make the first permanent English settlement in Amer- 
ica, at Jamestown, in Virginia. Elizabeth was dead. 
The masterful Tudor monarchs had passed from the 
stage and James, the pedant king, was on the throne. 



THE MAN OF LETTERS 17 

The " Age of the Stuarts " had come, with its sinister 
policies and sure tokens of revolution. Men then living 
were to see Charles lie dead upon the scaffold at White- 
hall. After that would come Cromwell; and then the 
second Charles, " restored," would go his giddy way 
through a demoralizing reign, and leave his sullen 
brother to face another revolution. Is was to be an 
age of profound constitutional change, deeply signifi- 
cant for all the English world; and the colonies in 
America, notwithstanding their separate life and the 
breadth of the sea, were to feel all the deep stir of the 
fateful business. The revolution wrought at home 
might in crossing to them suffer a certain sea-change, 
but it would not lose its use or its strong flavor of 
principle. 

In 1893 Mr. Wilson contributed a volume on 
" Division and Reunion " — that is to say, on the 
Civil War, its causes and consequences — to a 
series of " Epochs of American History." It is a 
school or college manual, highly condensed and 
yet readable. Mr. Wilson's literary art, however, 
is nowhere seen to greater advantage than in his 
popular " Life of Washington," a truly fascinat- 
ing book. Its narrative style is full of charm, 
and, while the personality of the hero stands out 
in due relief, the figures of the men who sur- 
rounded him are delineated with a sure and vivid 



18 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

touch. It is, perhaps, part of the secret of Mr. 
Wilson's success as a leader of men, that he has 
something of the dramatist's interest in individual 
human character. The book deserves to rank as 
a classic of historical biography, and ought to be 
much better known than it is on this side of the 
Atlantic. 

Apart from scattered magazine papers, Mr. 
Wilson's work as an essayist is contained in two 
volumes: " An Old Master " (1893) , and " Mere 
Literature" (1896). The former has unfor- 
tunately not been accessible to me ; but the latter 
affords ample material for an estimate of his 
qualities as a writer of " mere literature." And 
they are very high qualities. A prominent char- 
acteristic of his manner — not always a virtue, 
but seldom carried to such excess as to make it a 
vice — is the Emersonian habit of conveying 
thought by means of what may be called a run- 
ning-fire of generalizations. Here is a passage 
chosen literally at random — a sors Wilsoniana — 
from an essay entitled: " The Author Himself ": 

Culture broadens and sweetens literature, but native 
sentiment and unmarred individuality create it. Not 
all mental power lies in the processes of thinking. 



THE MAN OF LETTERS 19 

There is power also in passion, in personality, in 
simple, native, uncritical conviction, in unschooled feel- 
ing. The power of science, of system is executive, not 
stimulative. I do not find that I derive inspiration, but 
only information, from the learned historians and 
analysts of liberty ; but from the sonneteers, the poets, 
who speak its spirit and its exalted purpose, and who, 
recking nothing of the historical method, obey only the 
high method of their own hearts — ^what may a man not 
gain of courage and confidence in the right way of 
politics ? 

From every page of these essays there breathes 
an intense love of literature and of the fine things 
of literature, the expressions of a broad and 
catholic humanity. Mr. Wilson has a great con- 
tempt for the mere pedant; and for the mere 
aesthete he has very small sympathy. His mind 
is steeped in the best traditions of his own lan- 
guage. He speaks of Montaigne and of Montes- 
quieu with high respect, but I do not remember 
that, in his literary essays, he mentions any other 
French authors. Though his work in political 
science shows that he is familiar with German, 
Lessing is, I think, the only German classic to 
whom he refers. His deep literary piety, if one 
may so phrase it, speaks in a hundred passages — 



20 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

notably in the conclusion of the essay from which 
" Mere Literature " takes its title. 

If this free people to which we belong is to keep its 
fine spirit, its perfect temper amidst affairs, its high 
courage in the face of difficulties, its wise temperate- 
ness and wide-eyed hope, it must continue to drink deep 
and often from the old wells of English undefiled, quaff 
the keen tonic of its best ideals, keep its blood warm 
with all the great utterances of exalted purpose and 
pure principle of which its matchless literature is full. 
The great spirits of the past must command us in the 
tasks of the future. Mere literature will keep us pure 
and keep us strong. Even though it puzzle or alto- 
gether escape scientific method, it may keep our horizon 
clear for us, and our eyes glad to look bravely forth 
upon the world. 

Listen, again, to the thought inspired in him 
by this (and another) passage from Burke: 
" We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this 
fierce people (the American colonists) and per- 
suade them that they are not sprung from a 
nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circu- 
lates. The language in which they would hear 
you tell them this tale would detect the imposi- 
tion ; your speech would betray you. An English- 
man is the unfittest person on earth to argue 



THE MAN OF LETTERS 21 

another Englishman into slavery." This is Mr. 
Wilson's comment: 

Does not your blood stir at these passages? And is 
it not because, besides loving what is nobly written, you 
feel that every word strikes toward the heart of things 
that have made your blood what it has proved to be in 
the history of our race? 

It does not seem to be on record that Mr. 
Wilson ever ventured across the frontiers of 
meter ; but, if he is not a poet, it is certainly not 
for lack of imagination. The last essay in " Mere 
Literature," entitled " The Course of American 
History," presents a nobly imaginative picture of 
the conquest of the continent. Selection is diffi- 
cult, because of the fine coherence of the process 
of thought which runs through the paper ; but the 
following passages may convey some taste of its 
quality: 

The passes of the eastern mountains were the arteries 
of the nation's life. The real breath of our growth and 
manhood came into our nostrils when first, like Gov- 
ernor Spotswood and that gallant company of Vir- 
ginian gentlemen that rode with him in the far year, 
1716, the Knights of the Order of the Golden Horse- 
shoe, our pioneers stood upon the ridges of the eastern 



22 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

hills and looked down upon those reaches of the con- 
tinent where lay the paths of the westward migration. 
There, upon the courses of the distant rivers that 
gleamed before them in the sun, down the further 
slopes of the hills beyond, out upon the broad fields 
that lay upon the fertile banks of the " Father of 
Waters," up the long tilt of the continent to the vast 
hills that looked out upon the Pacific — there were the 
regions in which, joining with people from every race 
and clime under the sun, they were to make the great 
compounded nation whose liberty and mighty works of 
peace were to cause all the world to stand at gaze. 

How finely touched, again, is this picture of 
the breed of men by whom the conquest was 
accomplished : 

A roughened race embrowned in the sun, hardened in 
manner by a coarse life of change and danger, loving 
the rude woods and the crack of the rifle, living to begin 
something new every day, striking with the broad and 
open hand, delicate in nothing but the touch on the 
trigger, leaving cities in its track as if by accident 
rather than by design, settling again to the steady 
ways of a fixed life only when it must: such was the 
American people whose achievement it was to be to 
take possession of their continent from end to end ere 
their national government was a single century old. 

The paper ends with a fine tribute to Lincoln. 
No one has spoken more worthily than Woodrow 



THE MAN OF LETTERS 23 

Wilson of his two great predecessors in the presi- 
dential chair. It is not in this essay, however, but 
in an earlier one, that he says of Lincoln : " To 
the Eastern politicians he seemed like an accident; 
but to history he must seem like a providence." 

Some of Mr. Wilson's most characteristic work 
is to be found in his occasional papers and 
addresses. One of the most thoughtful of his 
essays is entitled: " When a Man comes to Him- 
self," or, in other words, realizes his predestinate 
place and function in the world. The following is 
Mr. Wilson's ingenious variation on a theme as 
old as the Forest of Arden; " All the world's a 
stage " : 



A man is the part he plays among his fellows. He 
is not isolated; he cannot be. . . . Some play with a 
certain natural passion ; an unstudied directness, with- 
out grace, without modulation, with no study of the 
masters, or consciousness of the pervading spirit of the 
plot ; others give all their thought to their costume and 
think only of the audience ; a few act as those who have 
mastered the secrets of a serious art, with deliberate 
subordination of themselves to the great end and 
motive of the play, spending themselves like good serv- 
ants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity, 
lending heart and tone and gesture to the perfect prog- 



24 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

ress of the action. These have " found themselves," 
and have all the ease of a perfect adjustment. 

An essay " On Being Human " is full of preg- 
nant passages. " It is certainly human," says 
our author, " to mind your neighbor's business 
as well as your own. Gossips are only sociolo- 
gists upon a mean and petty scale." And again: 
"Is it because we are better at being common 
scolds than at being wise advisers that w^e prefer 
little reforms to big ones?" Many good things 
have been said about books and reading : indeed, 
whole anthologies have been composed of them; 
but none of the anthologies contains anything 
better than this : 

You devour a book meant to be read, not because 
you would fill yourself or have an anxious care to be, 
nourished, but because it contains such stuff as it makes 
the mind hungry to look upon. Neither do you read 
it to kill time, but to lengthen time, rather adding to 
it its natural usury by living the more abundantly while 
it lasts, joining another's life and thought to your own. 

Here, again, is a passage which touches the 
very root of the evils from which the world of to- 
day is suffering: 



THE MAN OF LETTERS 25 

We do not want our poetry from grammarians, nor 
our tales from philologists, nor our history from theo- 
rists. . . . Neither do we want our political economy 
from tradesmen nor our statesmanship from mere poli- 
ticians, but from those who see more and care for more 
than these men see or care for. 

If in this passage Mr. Wilson hints at the type 
of statesman which the world, to its sorrow, has 
so plentifully bred in these latter days, he also 
gives us, in the following character of " the truly 
human man," an outline of the qualities in which 
healing may be found: 

This is our conception of the truly human man; a 
man in whom there is a just balance of faculties, a 
catholic sympathy — no brawler, no fanatic, no phari- 
see; not too credulous in hope, not too desperate in 
purpose; warm, but not hasty; ardent, and full of 
definite power, but not running about to be pleased and 
deceived by every new thing. 

To. some people this may seem a prosaic and 
pedestrian ideal of character. There are men 
and women (they have, no doubt, their uses in 
the world) in whose eyes not to be a fanatic is 
to be a philistine, and who despise nothing so 
much as the Horatian conception of the justum 



26 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

ac tenacem propositi virum. But the driving 
power of the world does not come from fanati- 
cism, even if its inspiration be good. It may have 
the momentary value of a stimulant, helpful in a 
great crisis, even if its help has to be paid for by 
subsequent reaction. But it is calm and resolute 
reason that does the lasting things, while impa- 
tient idealism exhausts itself in untimely strivings 
and vain denunciations. To borrow an illustra- 
tion from President Wilson himself, it was not 
the passionate abolitionism of William Lloyd 
Garrison that abolished slavery — it was the im- 
perturbable wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. 

I have not, in this short study, attempted any 
critical estimate of President Wilson's place in 
American literature. My object has been simply 
to show that, whatever else he may be, he is a man 
of letters to the finger-tips — a man steeped in 
literary traditions, and possessed of fine literary 
gifts. He can make political science readable to 
the layman (no small achievement, by the way), 
and he can make history fascinating without 
imparting to it the cheap over-coloring of fiction 
or the hectic fervor of partisanship. This aspect 
of his genius is not sufficiently recognized either 
here or in his own country. His administrative 



THE MAN OF LETTERS 27 

achievements, both in education and politics, and 
his fame as a statesman, have echpsed his repute 
as an author. But there can be little doubt that if 
he had not abandoned the contemplative for the 
active life, he would have taken a high place 
among contemporary writers of the English lan- 
guage; and, even as it is, it ought not to be for- 
gotten that this great President is at the same 
time an accomplished and attractive man of 
letters. 



Ill 

PRINCETON 

It was as President of Princeton that Mr. 
Wilson was first enabled to give proof of that 
force of character and executive ability which, 
ten years later, made him President of the United 
States. An American University offers far more 
opportunity than an English University, com- 
posed of separate and practically autonomous 
colleges, for an individual will to impress itself 
upon the educational and social policy of the 
whole institution. His twelve years of work as 
a professor had enabled Mr. Wilson to form very 
decided views as to the defects of the existing 
system. He approached his hew task in the spirit 
of a genial but resolute reformer, both on the 
educational and on the social side. The educa- 
tional part of his programme he carried out with 
brilliant success ; on the social side he encountered 
difficulties which he very nearly overcame, but 
which ultimately proved insuperable. 



PRINCETON 29 

There had for some time been a tendency in 
American Universities to allow their undergrad- 
uates undue latitude in the choice of their subjects 
of study. They were too readily permitted to 
follow the line of least resistance, and either to 
obey the dictates of immature taste (more rightly 
to be termed fancy), or to specialize too soon on 
" bread-studies," as distinct from the less obvi- 
ously remunerative branches of study which are 
essential to mental discipline and general culture. 
To this abuse of the " elective " system Mr. Wil- 
son offered a determined opposition, which pro- 
duced excellent results at Princeton, and has had 
great influence in other universities. He insisted 
on the necessity of a certain amount of " drill " 
as the basis of all sound education. In an address 
to Princeton alumni, delivered in New York 
soon after he entered upon office, he said : 

There are diiferent sorts of subjects in a curriculum, 
let me remind you; there are drill subjects, which I 
suppose are mild forms of torture, but to which every 
man must submit. So far as my own experience is 
concerned, the natural carnal man never desires to 
learn mathematics. . . . There are some drill sub- 
jects which are just as necessary as measles in order 
to make a man a grown-up person ; he must have gone 



30 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

through those things in order to qualify himself for 
the experiences of life; he must have crucified his will. 
. . . That I believe is necessary for the salvation of 
his soul. 

But while in this passage he laid down a sound 
principle as to the function of education in gen- 
eral, it was in his Inaugural Address at Prince- 
ton (October 25th, 1902) that he propounded his 
ideal of university education in particular : 

There are two ways of preparing a young man for 
his life-work. One is to give him the skill and special 
knowledge which will make a good tool, an excellent 
bread-wining tool of him; and for thousands of young 
men that way must be followed. It is a good way. 
It is honorable. It is indispensable. But it is not for 
the college, and it never can be for the college. The 
college should seek to make the men whom it receives 
something more than excellent servants of a trade or 
skilled practitioners of a profession. It should give 
them elasticity of faculty and breadth of vision, so that 
they shall have a surplus of mind to expend, not upon 
their profession only, for its liberalization and enlarge- 
ment, but also upon the broader interests which lie 
about them, in the spheres in which they are to be, not 
bread-winners merely, but citizens as well, and in their 
own hearts, where they are to grow to the stature of 
real nobility. It is this free capital of mind the world 



PRINCETON 31 

most stands in need of — this free capital that awaits 
investment in undertakings, spiritual as well as material, 
which advance the race and help all men to a better life. 

"Free capital of mind!" Could there be a 
better definition of the ideal product of university 
training? It was with this ideal in view that the 
new President set about his re-organization of the 
Princeton curriculum. He made it impossible 
for a young man, before his aptitudes had been 
put to any real test, before even his tastes had 
got beyond the stage of mere boyish whim, to 
choose a " soft job " and make that his chief, or 
his only, academic interest. The system he intro- 
duced is known as that of " group electives." 
During the student's first two years, his choice is 
limited to certain strictly-prescribed groups of 
studies, while in the remainder of the four years' 
course a certain latitude of selection is allowed, 
so as to leave ample room for the development of 
individuality. The change had a markedly invig- 
orating effect upon the whole atmosphere of the 
University. 

Before his advent, moreover, it had been too 
much the practice to convey information by mere 
formal lectures, which the student might or might 



32 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

not attend, and from which, even if present in the 
body, he might very easily be absent in the spirit. 
The industrious student took voluminous notes, 
the idle student tried, when examinations time 
approached, to borrow the notes of his industri- 
ous comrade. It is the experience of many 
students, where the lecture system prevails, that 
the time spent in the class-room is largely wasted, 
and that there is much more profit in reading the 
professor's authorities than in listening to the 
professor. Mr. Wilson so modified this rather 
somnolent system as to bring the mind of the 
teacher and the pupil into more active and stimu- 
lating contact. Even so early as 1894, he had 
shown, in an article contributed to the Forum, 
that this reform was in his mind. He then wrote : 

The serious practical question is: How are all the 
men of a University to be made to read English litera- 
ture widely and intelligently? For it is reading, not 
set lectures, that will prepare a soil for culture: the 
inside of books, and not talk about them: though there 
must be the latter also to serve as a chart and guide 
to the reading. The difficulty is not in reality very 
great. A considerable number of young tutors, serv- 
ing their novitiate for full university appointments, 
might easily enough effect an organization of the men 
that would secure reading. Taking them in groups of 



PRINCETON 33 

manageable numbers, suggesting the reading of each 
group, and by frequent interviews and quizzes [oral 
examinations] seeing that it was actually done . . . 
they could not only get the required tasks performed, 
but relieve them of the hateful appearance of being 
tasks, and cheer and enrich the whole life of the 
University. 

This passage contained the germ of the " pre- 
ceptorial system " which Mr. Wilson succeeded in 
establishing. It combined some of the features 
of the English tutorial system and of the German 
Seminar, The result was a very marked raising 
of the intellectual standard of the university. 
The mere drone was practically eliminated, and 
real keenness of interest in things of the mind was 
most effectually promoted. 

It can scarcely be doubted, too, — though in 
this field results are less easily measured — that 
Mr. Wilson's influence did something to check 
the tendency of American education (under 
German influence) to concentrate attention on 
the mere mint and cummin of scholarship, to the 
exclusion of its spirit and essence. The first essay 
in his book " Mere Literature " is for the most 
part a protest against this tendency. The ironic 
humor of the following passage cannot disguise 



34. THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

the fact that the author is very much in earnest. 
If you are to promote the study of great litera- 
ture, he says, you must have a heart to feel with 
the great writers, " an eye to see what they see, 
an imagination to keep them company, a pulse 
to experience their delights." 

But if you have none of these things, you may make 
shift to do without them. You may count the words 
they use, instead, note the changes of phrase they make 
in successive revisions, put their rhythm into a scale of 
feet, run their allusions — particularly their female al- 
lusions — to cover, detect them in their previous reading. 
Or, if none of these things please you, or you find the 
big authors difficult or dull, you may drag to light all 
the minor writers of their time, who are easy to under- 
stand. By setting an example in such methods, you 
render great services in certain directions. You make 
the higher degrees of our Universities available for the 
large number of respectable men who can count, and 
measure, and search diligently; and that may prove no 
small matter. You divert attention from thought, 
which is not always easy to get at, and fix attention 
upon language, as upon a curious mechanism, which can 
be perceived with the bodily eye, and which is worthy 
to be studied for its own sake, quite apart from any- 
thing it may mean. You encourage the examination of 
forms, grammatical and metrical, which can be quite 
accurately determined and quite exhaustively cata- 



PRINCETON 35 

logued. You bring all the visible phenomena of writ- 
ing to light and into ordered system. You go further, 
and show how to make careful literal identification of 
stories somewhere told, ill and without art, with the 
same stories told over again by the masters, well and 
with the transfiguring effect of genius. You thus 
broaden the area of science; for you rescue the con- 
crete phenomena of the expression of thoughts — the 
necessary syllabification which accompanies it, the in- 
evitable juxtaposition of words, the constant use of 
particles, the habitual display of roots, the inveterate 
repetition of names, the recurrent employment of mean- 
ings heard or read — from their confusion with the 
otherwise unclassifiable manifestations of what had 
hitherto been accepted, without critical examination, 
under the lump term " literature," simply for the pleas- 
ure and spiritual edification to be got from it. 

The writer of these delightful pages would 
assuredly lend no countenance to the dry-as-dust 
conception of scholarship which seeks to choke 
out its human and spiritual essence. 

Having successfully introduced a new spirit 
into the educational side of the institution con- 
fided to his charge, Mr. Wilson, at the end of his 
fifth year of office, felt that the time had come 
to attempt the social changes demanded by his 
truly democratic ideals. His predecessor in the 



36 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

office of President had declared it impossible that 
Princeton should be other than a college for rich 
men's sons, and it had been described as " the 
most charming Country Club in America." Its 
peculiar feature among American universities 
was the club-houses which formed the centers of j 
social intercourse for the senior students. Twelve 
of these luxurious and exclusive establishments 
stood in their spacious grounds close to the Uni- 
versity buildings. Only third and fourth year 
students could belong to them; but to secure 
entrance became the burning ambition of " fresh- 
men " and " sophomores " — an ambition far more 
potent than the desire for distinction in scholar- 
ship, or even in games. The system involved a 
great deal of harmful wear-and-tear of mental 
tissue, and led to bitter heart-burnings and crush- 
ing disappointments. Moreover, it established 
a sort of plutocratic standard in the life of the 
University — a form of snobbery which ought to 
have been repulsive to sound American sentiment, 
and was highly repulsive to Mr. Wilson. He felt 
that the way to break it down was not to attack 
the clubs directly, but to establish a new order of 
residential halls or hostels, in which " men should 
be so distributed that rich and poor, elder and 



PRINCETON 37 

younger, would be thrown together." Such hos- 
tels for freshmen and sophomores had already 
been successfully introduced in connection with 
the " preceptorial " system; and Mr. Wilson now 
proposed to extend to senior men the benefits, 
as he conceived them, of this form of collegiate 
life. His proposal was accepted by the Trustees 
of the University, only one dissenting; but when 
it was made public it met with a storm of opposi- 
tion. American universities are largely depend- 
ent for funds upon the liberality of their ex- 
students or " alumni " ; the affections of the 
alumni of Princeton were rooted in the Club 
system ; and it was found that an attack upon it 
would so gravely impair the financial prospects of 
the institution that the Trustees were forced to 
withdraw their consent to the President's scheme. 
In another, somewhat similar, episode, the 
power of the purse succeeded in baffling Mr. 
Wilson's idealism. The University lacked ac- 
commodation for post-graduate courses, and a 
lady bequeathed to it a sum of a quarter of a 
million dollars (£50,000) for the establishment 
of a Graduate School. A " Dean " was appoint^^ 
for the as yet unborn institution, and proceeded 
to draw up proposals for " an ornate and luxu- 



38 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

rious school, severed both in situation and in 
mental atmosphere from the rest of Princeton," 
which Mr. Wilson strongly disapproved. While 
the matter was in suspense, another bequest, this 
time of half a million dollars, was made to the 
Graduate School. It was saddled, however, with 
two conditions — first, that another half-million 
dollars should be raised from other sources, and 
second that the scheme of the aristocratically- 
minded Dean should be accepted. Mr. Wilson 
was immovable in his principles, and succeeded in 
working up the Trustees to such a point of 
heroism that (though the supplementary half- 
million was already promised) they had fully 
determined to renounce the whole million rather 
than sanction what they felt to be, educationally 
and socially, a false move. This would have been 
a great triumph to set off against the defeat in 
the Battle of the Clubs. But alas! at the decisive 
moment, a third bequest was announced, this 
time of three million dollars, on condition that 
the disputed scheme should be carried into effect. 
Such an argument was more than human nature 
could resist, and the Trustees pocketed at once 
their principles — or, rather, Mr. Wilson's — and 
the £600,000. 



IV 

NEW JERSEY 

The first book which Woodrow Wilson pub- 
lished was, as we have seen, " Congressional 
Government : A Study of the American Consti- 
tution." It reached its twenty-fourth edition in 
1912. " In American literature," says Mr. Ford, 
" it occupies a place like that of Bagehot's treat- 
ise in English literature." The various professor- 
ships and lectureships he had held were all con- 
cerned with subjects germane to the public life 
of the nation. He had lectured on history, poht- 
ical science, political economy, jurisprudence and 
constitutional law; and in dealing with all these 
subjects he had shown penetrating insight, a rare 
grasp of mind, and a high, yet thoroughly prac- 
tical, idealism. He was, moreover, a highly- 
trained and effective public speaker; and his 
Presidency of Princeton had shown him to pos- 
sess the gifts of an efficient administrator and a 



40 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

born leader of men. Such a combination of quali- 
ties clearly designated him to play a conspicuous 
part on the political stage; but, though he had 
delivered many occasional addresses on political 
subjects, he had not, until 1910, gone down into 
the arena and taken part in any political 
campaign. 

His courageous and enterprising policy as 
head of one of the three leading Universities of 
the seaboard states had made for him a national 
reputation; but it was inevitable that he should 
be best known in the state in which the university 
is situated, only some ten miles from the state 
capital, Trenton. In the summer of 1910, the 
Democrats of that state, looking about for a can- 
didate whose character and record would assure 
their success in the approaching election for the 
Governorship, fixed their choice on the President 
of Princeton. He had taken no step whatever to 
secure nomination; but when he was called upon 
to declare whether he would accept it if offered, 
he returned this straightforward answer: 

I need not say that I am in no sense a candidate for 
the nomination, and that I would not, under any cir- 
cumstances, do anything to obtain it. My present 



I 



NEW JERSEY 41 

duties and responsibilities are such as would satisfy any 
man desirous of rendering public service. They cer- 
tainly satisfy me, and I do not wish to draw away 
from them. 

But my wish does not constitute my duty, and, if it 
should turn out to be true, as so many well-informed 
persons have assured me they believe it will, that it is 
the wish and hope of a decided majority of the thought- 
ful Democrats of the state, that I should consent to 
accept the party's nomination for the great office of 
Governor, I should deem it my duty, as well as an honor 
and a privilege, to do so. 



His strength as a candidate was shown by the 
fact that, when the Democratic State Convention 
met in September, he was nominated on the first 
ballot ; and he carried the election, in November^ 
not, indeed, by a majority of the whole votes, but 
by a " plurality " of nearly 50,000 over the can- 
didate who stood next to him. 

The wire-pullers of the Democratic party in 
New Jersey had accepted Mr. Wilson as a 
" strong " candidate— that is to say, one likely 
to appeal to the individual voter — but also, per- 
haps, in the hope that, being new to the activities 
of political life, he would prove a weak and easily- 
managed Governor. Of this illusion, if they in- 



42 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

deed cherished it, they were quickly disabused. 
The democratic " boss " was a gentleman of 
whose record Mr. Wilson had no high opinion, 
and, in agreeing to stand for the Governorship, 
he had stipulated that this politician should not 
figure on the same " ticket " as candidate for the 
position of United States Senator from New 
Jersey. The nomination for that position had 
accordingly fallen to a Mr. Martine. The elec- 
tion, however, had given the Democrats a major- 
ity of twenty-one in the two houses of the state 
legislature, by whom the United States senators 
are elected; and seeing this, the "boss," Mr. 
Smith, determined to offer himself as candidate 
for the senatorship, nothing doubting that his 
obedient henchmen would ignore the popular 
election and give him their votes. This was not 
only an autocratic overriding of party discipline, 
but a breach of an honorable understanding. 
Had Mr. Wilson permitted it to pass, he would 
practically have joined the ranks of the boss's 
henchmen. He did not permit it to pass. He 
gave Mr. Smith forty-eight hours to withdraw 
his candidature, with the intimation that if this 
were not done, he would publicly denounce him. 
The boss ignored the ultimatum, and the Gov- 



NEW JERSEY 43 

ernor executed his threat. He did not go to the 
party wire-pullers, he went direct to the people, 
and at a series of public meetings, exposed the 
iniquity of the manoeuver with such effect that, 
when the legislature met, Mr. Martine was duly 
sent to Washington, and the boss, his power 
broken, was left out in the cold. 

The Governor of an American state stands to 
the legislature in very much the relation of the 
President to Congress. Even in his first book on 
the American Constitution, Mr. Wilson had de- 
plored the complete separation between the 
executive and the legislative function on which 
the Constitution insists. It was his frequently- 
repeated opinion that " the separation of the 
right to plan from the duty to execute has always 
led to blundering and inefficiency." He had also 
freely criticized the system whereby almost all 
bills are referred to departmental committees of 
the various legislatures, often to be heard of no 
more. Practically the whole legislative function 
is thus delegated to these committees^ who sit in 
private and of whose proceedings no record is 
available. When they report a bill to the House, 
discussion of it is reduced to a minimum, and the 
merits of a measure are seldom or never publicly 



44 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

thrashed out.* There is, however, one constitu- 
tional provision which enables a Governor (or a 
President) of energetic character and strong 
convictions to exercise a very real influence on 
legislation. He is empowered, and indeed in- 
structed, to give information to the " legislative 
body as to the state of the commonwealth, and to 
recommend to their consideration such measures 
as he shall judge necessary and expedient." It is 
thus evidently within the rights of the head of 
the Executive to urge, though not to impose, his 
views upon the legislature; and Mr. Wilson was 
both by theory and by temperament inclined to 
make the fullest use of this prerogative. 

From the moment of his entry upon office, he 
made it clear that the legislature of New Jersey 
had no King Log to deal with. He had an- 
nounced a programme of sweeping reform, and 
he applied himself vigorously to securing its exe- 
cution. His first great measure was an attack 
upon the system which left nominations for polit- 
ical office (or in other words, the composition of 
the party " ticket ") in the hands of bosses work- 

* Readers who wish to obtain an insight into the workings of 
American state politics (which are practically national politics in 
miniature) may be referred to Mr. Winston Churchill's excellent 
novels, "Coniston" and "Mr. Crewe's Career." 



NEW JERSEY (45] 

ing through carefully packed and manipulated 
delegations. A bill introducing, or rather reviv- 
ing, the system of " direct Primaries " — that is, 
the nomination of party candidates by direct 
popular vote — was carried in spite of the most 
formidable opposition, entirely in virtue of the 
energy and resolution with which the Governor 
threw himself into the breach in its defense. 
Other measures of no less importance followed : 
an Employers' Liability Act; a Corrupt Prac- 
tices Act of a drastic nature ; and an act establish- 
ing a Pubhc Utilities Commission for the control 
of all companies enjoying exceptional privileges 
(or " franchises ") in view of services to be ren- 
dered to the community. The importance of this 
measure is apparent when we consider that in 
America almost all public services in connection 
with transit, lighting, water supply, telephones, 
etc., are in the hands of private companies, whose 
natural tendency is to take wide views of their 
privileges and narrow views of their duties. Their 
constant efforts to influence the legislature were 
a source of much " scheming, lobbying, intrigu- 
ing " — and corruption. The Commission — a 
small body to which responsibility can easily be 
brought home — relieves the legislature of a func- 



46 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

tion which it is ill fitted to perform, controls, in 
the interests of the public, the operations and the 
charges of the companies, and at the same time, 
in the interests of the shareholders, keeps an eye 
on their finances. 

Mr. Wilson proved, in short, during his brief 
term as Governor, that he was no mere theorist 
in politics, but an eminently practical man, with 
a remarkable gift for getting things done. Dur- 
ing the Presidential campaign of 1912, he him- 
self gave an account of his stewardship in New 
Jersey, which may be summarized as follows : 

I had no merit as a candidate for Governor, except 
that I said what I really thought, and the compliment 
that the people paid me was in believing that I meant 
what I said. Unless they had believed in the Governor 
whom they then elected, unless they had trusted him 
deeply and altogether, he could have done absolutely 
nothing. . . . The things that have happened in New 
Jersey since 1910 have happened because the seed was 
planted in the fine fertile soil of confidence, of trust, 
of renewed hope. 

The moment the forces in New Jersey that had 
resisted reform realized that the people were backing 
new men who meant what they said, they realized that 
they dared not resist them. It was not the personal 
force of the new officials ; but it was the moral strength 



NEW JERSEY 47 

of their backing that accomplished the extraordinary 
result. 

And what was accomplished? Mere justice to classes 
that had not been treated justly before. Every school- 
boy in the state of New Jersey, if he cared to look into 
the matter, could comprehend the fact that the laws 
applying to laboring men, with respect to compensation 
when they were hurt in their various employments, had 
originated at a time when society was organized very 
differently from the way in which it is organized now, 
and that because the law had not been changed, the 
courts were obliged to go blindly on administering laws 
which were cruelly unsuitable to existing conditions. 
. . . Nobody seriously debated the circumstances; 
everybody knew that the law was antiquated and im- 
possible; everybody knew that justice waited to be 
done. Very well, then, why wasn't it done? 

There was another thing that we wanted to do: we 
wanted to regulate our public service corporations so 
that we could get the proper service from them, and on 
reasonable terms. That had been done elsewhere, and 
where it had been done, it had proved just as much for 
the benefit of the corporations themselves as for the 
benefit of the people. We were not trying to do any- 
thing novel in New Jersey; we were simply trying to 
adopt there a tested measure of public justice. We 
adopted it. Has anybody gone bankrupt since? Does 
anybody now doubt that it was just as much for the 
benefit of the public service corporations as for the 
people of the state? 



48 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

Then there was another thing that we modestly de- 
sired. We wanted fair elections ; we did not want can- 
didates to buy themselves into office. That seemed 
reasonable, so we adopted a law, unique in one par- 
ticular: that if you bought an office, you didn't get it. 
I admit that is contrary to all commercial principles, 
but I think it is pretty good political doctrine. . . . 

We adopted a Corrupt Practices Act, and an Elec- 
tion Act, which every man predicted was not going to 
work, but which did work — ^to the emancipation of the 
voters of New Jersey. 

All these things are now commonplaces with us. We 
like the laws that we have passed, and no man ventures 
to suggest any material change in them. Why didn't 
we get them long ago ? What hindered us ? Why, we 
had a closed Grovernment ; not sLn open Government. It 
did not belong to us. It was managed by little groups 
of men, whose names we knew, but whom somehow we 
didn't seem able to dislodge. When we elected men 
pledged to dislodge them, they only went into partner- 
ship with them. Apparently what was necessary was 
to call in an amateur who knew so little about the 
game that he supposed that he was expected to do 
what he had promised to do. 

The intervention of this simple-minded " ama- 
teur " in the politics of the world may one 
day be recognized as no less conspicuously benefi- 
cent than it was in the politics of New Jersey. 



THE WHITE HOUSE 

It was perhaps the accident of his birth and 
upbringing in the South that originally made 
Woodrow Wilson a Democrat rather than a 
Republican. At all events, a Democrat he had 
been from his boyhood upwards. We have seen 
that, as an undergraduate, he declined to assume 
the Republican colors, and to champion a pro- 
tective tariff, even in the mimic warfare of a 
debating-club. But there can be no doubt that 
he was temperamentally a Democrat in more 
than a merely technical and party sense. He 
believed profoundly in government by the people 
in the widest sense of the word — not in govern- 
ment by the privileged classes, and still less in 
government by gangs, cabals and conspiracies. 
What may have been in the first instance an acci- 
dental bias, had ripened, through study and 
thought, into a deep and settled conviction. Hav- 

49 



50 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

ing made a searching examination of all forms of 
human government, he had come to the deliberate 
conclusion that, when a people has arrived at a 
certain stage of political intelligence, it is best 
governed by persons elected to give effect to its 
predominant will. No one knew better than he 
the difficulty of securing even an approximately 
accurate expression of that will ; no one knew bet- 
ter the abuses to which popular government is 
exposed. But he felt that the worst abuses of 
democracy were less noxious and more corrigible 
than the abuses of other forms of government, 
and he remained unswervingly loyal to the Amer- 
ican Idea. It was the task of his political career 
to secure for that Idea an ever fuller and purer 
expression in the national life. 

The original distinction between the Repub- 
lican and the Democratic parties concerned the 
respective rights of the Central or Federal Gov- 
ernment and the Governments of the individual 
states. The Republicans insisted on, and wished 
to extend, the powers of the President and Con- 
gress, the Democrats insisted on the principle of 
state sovereignty, and were jealous of all en- 
croachments. The Civil War was a tragically 
intransigeant assertion of state rights, including 



THE WHITE HOUSE 51 

the right of secession from the Union. The South 
failed in the great argument, and no reasonable 
Southerner now regrets the failure. Neverthe- 
less the South remains solidly Democratic, and 
the principle of state rights remains an official 
plank in the party platform. But it is no longer 
the central plank. Of late years the most promi- 
nent article in the Democratic creed has been the 
principle that import duties should be imposed for 
revenue only, and not for protection of manu- 
factures. Under cover of the protective tariff, a 
great system of monopolies had grown up, which 
Woodrow Wilson and his party believed to be in 
every way injurious to the true interests of the 
people. It was on that issue that the Presidential 
election of 1912 was fought. 

The presidency of Mr. Taft had been a disap- 
pointment. Though an able and an honest man, 
he was too acquiescent. He lacked the energy 
and initiative demanded by the conjuncture of 
affairs. Reform was in the air : the only question 
was as to the principles which should guide it. In 
the three-cornered contest which ultimately took 
shape, Mr. Taft and the orthodox Republicans 
stood for an easy-going conservatism, which Mr. 
Wilson described as " do-nothingism " or " sit- 



52 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

ting still for fear something should happen ; " 
Mr. Roosevelt and the dissident, or, as they called 
themselves, Progressive Republicans, stood for 
reform on conservatives lines; while Mr. Wilson 
and the Democrats stood for what was considered 
radical reform, though its radicalism, as we shall 
see, was of no very alarming type. 

The principles for which Mr. Wilson con- 
tended may be best studied in his campaign 
speeches, a selection from which has been 
published under the title of " The New Free- 
dom." 

In the first place, let us take an utterance in 
which the speaker nails the colors of Democracy 
to his mast, proclaiming himself a Democrat not 
merely in the technical but in the most funda- 
mental sense: 



The utility, the vitality, the fruitage of life does not 
come from the top to the bottom; it comes, like the 
natural growth of a great tree, from the soil, up 
through the trunk into the branches to the foliage and 
the fruit. The great struggling unknown masses of 
the men who are at the base of everything are the dy- 
namic force that is lifting the levels of society. A 
nation is as great, and only as great, as her rank and 
file. 



THE WHITE HOUSE 53 

A hostile critic might say that such a paradox 
savored not so much of the democrat as of the 
demagogue, and recommend Mr. Wilson to read 
Ibsen's " Enemy of the People." But, rightly 
interpreted, the saying is profoundly true. The 
champions of things as they were, and notably 
of the high tariff and all that followed in its train, 
pointed to the " prosperity " which had accom- 
panied the organization of " big business." This 
was Mr. Wilson's reply. He meant that no 
amount of statistical prosperity is worth any- 
thing to a nation if it is purchased at the cost 
of human worth and human freedom. No nation 
deserves to be called " great " in which the mass 
of the people is led captive by organized and self- 
seeking interests. Towards the end of the speech 
he returned to the theme in the following passage : 

Nothing living can blossom into fruitage unless 
through nourishing stalks deep-planted in the common 
soil. The rose is merely the evidence of the vitality of 
the root ; and the real source of its beauty ; the very 
blush that it wears upon its tender cheek, comes from 
those silent sources of life that lie hidden in the chem- 
istry of the soil. Up from that soil, up from the silent 
bosom of the earth, rise the currents of life and energy. 
Up from the common soul, up from the quiet heart of 



54 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

the people, rise joyously to-day streams of hope and 
determination bound to renew the face of the earth in 
glory. 

In another place, Mr. Wilson thus defined his 
conception of that bent of the popular will which 
he was seeking a mandate to carry into action. 

We are in a temper to reconstruct economic society, 
as we were once in a temper to reconstruct political 
society, and political society may itself undergo a 
radical modification in the process. I doubt if any 
age was ever more conscious of its task or more unani- 
mously desirous of radical and extended changes in 
its economic and political practice. 

We stand in the presence of a revolution — not a 
bloody revolution, America is not given to the spilling 
of blood — ^but a silent revolution, whereby America will 
insist upon recovering in practice those ideals which 
she has always professed, a Government devoted to the 
general interest, and not to special interests. 

What, then, was the precise evil which Mr. 
Wilson pledged himself to combat? He defined 
it as follows : 

The facts of the situation amount to this: That a 
comparatively small number of men control the raw 
material of this country; that a comparatively small 



THE WHITE HOUSE 55 

number of men control the water-powers that can be 
made useful for the economical production of the 
energy to drive our machinery ; that that same number 
of men largely control the railroads; that by agree- 
ments handed around among themselves, they control 
prices, and that that same group of men control the 
larger credits of the country. 

In another place he enlarged upon this 
indictment : 

Who have been consulted when important measures 
of government, like tariff acts, and currency acts, and 
railroad acts, were under consideration? The people 
whom the tariff chiefly affects, the people for whom 
the currency is supposed to exist, the people who pay 
the duties and ride on the railroads ? Oh ! no. What 
do they know about such matters? The gentlemen 
whose ideas have been sought are the big manufacturers, 
the bankers, and the heads of the great railroad com- 
binations. The masters of the Government of the 
United States are the combined capitalists and manu- 
facturers of the United States. It is written over 
every intimate page of the records of Congress; it is 
written all through the history of conferences at the 
White House, that the suggestions of economic policy 
in this country have come from one source, not from 
many sources; the benevolent guardians, the kind- 
hearted trustees, who have taken the troubles of gov- 
ernment off our hands have become so conspicuous that 



56 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

almost anybody can write out a list of them. They 
have become so conspicuous that their names are men- 
tioned upon almost every political platform. The men 
who have undertaken the interesting job of taking care 
of us do not force us to requite them with anonymously 
directed gratitude. We know them by name. 

At the same time Mr. Wilson was always 
scrupulous in asserting that he was not attacking 
individuals : 

I want to record my protest against any discussion 
of this matter which would seem to indicate that there 
are bodies of our fellow-citizens who are trying to 
grind us down and do us injustice. There are some 
men of that sort. I don't know how they sleep o' 
nights, but there are men of that kind. Thank God, 
they are not numerous. The truth is, we are all caught 
in a great economic system which is heartless. 

The danger of the situation, as Mr. Wilson 
saw it, lay in the fact expressed in the old saying 
that a corporation " has neither a body to be 
kicked nor a soul to be damned." The law, 
framed in and for a time when " big business " 
in the modern sense was as yet scarcely dreamt of, 
and when a nation's rights in* the national re- 
sources of its territory were very imperfectly 



THE WHITE HOUSE 57 

recognized, was quite inadequate to dealing with 
the new situation which had arisen, both in re- 
gard to the relations between employers and em- 
ployed, and to the development of the potential 
wealth of the country. On the latter point Mr. 
Wilson said: 

Then there is the question of conservation. What 
is our fear about conservation? The hands that are 
being stretched out to monopolize our forests, to pre- 
vent the use of our great power-producing streams, 
the hands that are being stretched into the bowels of 
the earth to take possession of the great riches that 
lie hidden in Alaska and elsewhere in the incomparable 
domain of the United States, are the hands of monopoly. 
Are these men to continue to stand at the elbow of 
Government, and tell us how we are to save ourselves — 
from themselves? You cannot settle the question of 
conservation while monopoly is close to the ears of those 
who govern. And the question of conservation is a 
great deal bigger than the question of saving our 
forests and our mineral resources and our waters ; it is 
as big as the life and happiness and strength and elas- 
ticity and hope of our people. 

In a later speech he drove home the same 
point with still greater emphasis. 

What would our forests be worth without vigorous 
and intelligent men to make use of them.? Why should 



58 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

we conserve our natural resources, unless we can by the 
magic of industry transmute them into the wealth of 
the world? What transmutes them into that wealth, 
if not the skill and the touch of the men who go daily 
to their toil, and who constitute the great body of the 
American people? What I am interested in is having 
the Government of the United States more concerned 
about human rights than about property rights. Prop- 
erty is an instrument of humanity; humanity isn't an 
instrument of property. And yet when you see some 
men riding their great industries as if they were driving 
a car of juggernaut, not looking to see what multitudes 
prostrate themselves before the car and lose their lives 
in the crushing effect of their industry, you wonder how 
long men are going to be permitted to think more of 
their machinery than they think of their men. 

And how did Mr. Wilson propose to set about 
the remedying of these abuses ? In the first place, 
of course, he declared for the lowering of the 
tariff wall behind which they had ensconced 
themselves — the tariff which made monopoly 
possible, and handed over the government of the 
country to the small groups of men who benefited 
by it. Then he demanded the opening-up of the 
processes of politics. " They have been too 
secret," he said, " too complicated, too round- 
about; they have consisted too much of private 



THE WHITE HOUSE 59 

conferences and secret understandings, of the 
control of legislation by men who were not legis- 
lators, but who stood outside and dictated, con- 
trolling oftentimes by very questionable means 
which they would not have dreamed of allowing 
to become public." Then he insisted on the open- 
ing-up of " the processes of capital as well as the 
processes of politics " — " denying to those who 
conduct great modern operations of business the 
privacy that used to belong properly enough to 
men who used only their own capital and their in- 
dividual energy in business ": 

If there is nothing to conceal, then why conceal it? 
If it is a public game, why play it in private? If it is 
a public game, then why not come out into the open 
and play it in public? You have got to cure diseased 
politics as we nowadays cure tuberculosis, by making 
all the people who suffer from it live out of doors ; 
not only spend their days out of doors and walk 
around, but sleep out of doors ; always remain in the 
open, where they will be accessible to fresh, nourishing 
and revivifying influences. 

In this connection he used one of those admi- 
rable illustrations which not infrequently light up 
his speeches: 



60 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

It used to be true in our cities that every family 
occupied a separate house of its own, that every family 
had its own little premises, that every family was sepa- 
rated in its life from every other family. That is no 
longer the case in our great cities. Families live in 
tenements, they live in flats, they live on floors ; they 
are piled layer upon layer in the great tenement houses 
of our crowded districts. ... In some foreign coun- 
tries they have made much more progress than we in 
handling these things. In the city of Glasgow, for 
example (Glasgow is one of the model cities of the 
world), they have made up their minds that the entries 
and the hallways of great tenements are public streets. 
Therefore, the policeman goes up the stairway, and 
patrols the corridors ; the lighting department of the 
city sees to it that the halls are abundantly lighted. 
The city does not deceive itself into supposing that that 
great building is a unit from which the police are to 
keep out and the civic authority to be excluded, but it 
says : " These are public highways, and light is needed 
in them, and control by the authority of the city." 

I liken that to our great modern industrial enter- 
prises. A corporation is very like a large tenement 
house; it isn't the premises of a single commercial 
family; it is just as much a public affair as a tenement 
house is a network of public highways. 

One of the abuses to be remedied by dragging 
" big business " out into the Hght was the inter- 
locking of directorships, whereby one group of 



THE WHITE HOUSE 61 

men was able to control, not only their only par- 
ticular business, but all the ancillary services 
which ought to be freely at the disposal of every- 
one. Mr. Wilson pointed out, for example, that 
"the twenty-four men who control the United 
States Steel Corporation were either presidents 
or vice-presidents or directors in fifty-five per 
cent, of the railways of the United States " — a 
condition of things which could not but throw 
grave doubts upon the treatment likely to be 
meted out to rival steel producers in regard to 
the transport either of raw materials or of fin- 
ished products. Then, again, the same men were 
very probably directors of most of the leading, 
banks, and thus able to restrict, if not entirely to 
cut off, the credit facilities of any one who 
threatened them with competition. Such con- 
centrations of power in the hands of small groups 
of men were manifestly opposed to public policy ; 
and Mr. Wilson believed that the way to remedy 
them was to throw the backstairs and corridors 
of " big business " open to the light of public 
inspection. 

Mr. Roosevelt too had his plan for dealing with 
these evils. His proposal was not to overthrow 
monopolies, but to subject them to government 



62 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

control. Of that scheme Mr. Wilson spoke in 
the following terms: 

The Roosevelt plan is that there shall be an indus- 
trial commission charged with the supervision of the 
great monopolistic combinations which have been 
formed under the protection of the tariff, and that 
the Government of the United States shall see to it 
that these gentlemen who have conquered labor shall 
be kind to labor. I find, then, the proposition to be 
this: That there shall be two masters, the great cor- 
poration, and over it the Government of the United 
States; and I ask who is going to be master of the 
Government of the United States? It has a master 
now — those who in combination control these monop- 
olies. And if the Government controlled by the 
monopolies in its turn controls the monopolies, the 
partnership is finally consummated. 

In another place, he put his point even more 
forcibly : 

If the Government is to tell big business men how to 
run their business, then don't you see that big business 
men have to get closer to the Government even than 
they are now? Don't you see that they must capture 
the Government, in order not to be restrained too 
much by it? Got to capture the Government? They 
have already captured it. Are you going to invite 



THE WHITE HOUSE 63 

those inside to stay inside? They don't have to get 
there. They are there. Are you going to own your 
own premises, or are you not? That is your choice. 
Are you going to say : " You didn't get into the house 
the right way, but you are in there, God bless you; 
we will stand out here in the cold, and you can hand us 
out something once in a while.? " 

It is not for me to pronounce upon the justice 
of this criticism; but the delightful raciness of 
its wording is beyond dispute. 

These extracts give but a disconnected view 
of the well-knit body of thought which Mr. 
Wilson laid before his countrymen. The gist of 
his doctrine was that the people must resume 
control of their own affairs, taking it out of the 
hands of predatory millionaires working in col- 
lusion with political bosses on the one hand, and 
with irresponsible committee-men on the other. 
He believed that the American people were still 
capable of the effort required to this end, though 
"their self-reliance had been sapped by years 
of submission to the doctrine that prosperity is 
something that benevolent magnates provide 
with the aid of the Government." " The Ameri- 
can people," he said, " are not naturally st!ind- 
patters. Progress is the word that charms their 



64 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

ears and stirs their hearts." He took no melo- 
dramatic view of the forces opposed to him, but 
he did not underrate their strength. Here is 
a remark which evidently speaks from the heart 
of his experience as an administrator, and which 
all who have fought the battles of progress will 
endorse : 

For my part, I am very much more afraid of the 
man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad 
than of the man who docs a bad thing and knows it is 
bad ; because I think that in pubhc affairs stupidity is 
more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight 
and dislodge. 

" Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst 
vergebens," said Schiller's Talbot; and though 
Mr. Wilson is too staunch an optimist to say 
that "the struggle nought availeth," he knows 
how disheartening it is. Here is another remark 
from the same speech in which, for once, we may 
discern a little touch of bitterness : 

The idea of the Presidents we have recently had has 
been that they were Presidents of a National Board 
of Trustees. That is not my idea. I have been Presi- 
dent of one board of trustees, and I do not care to 
have another on my hands. I want to be President of 
the people of the United States. 



THE WHITE HOUSE 65 

He became President of the United States, 
but it was in virtue of the division in the forces 
opposed to him. In the votes of the electoral 
college he had an immense majority. The 
figures were: 

Wilson 435 

Roosevelt 88 

Taft 8 

But, says Mr. Wilson Harris, "the popular 
vote rarely bears any recognizable relation to 
the electoral vote, since the party gaining a 
series of small majorities in populous states like 
New York or Pennsylvania or Illinois secures 
not merely a proportionate majority, but the 
whole state vote, in the electoral college." The 
actual number of votes cast for the three candi- 
dates were: 



Wilson 


6,286,987 


Roosevelt 


4,125,804 


Taft 


3,475,813 



Thus the whole Democratic vote fell more 
than a million and a quarter short of the whole 
Republican vote. A single strong Republican 
candidate would in all probability have carried 



ee THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

the day. On the other hand, in both of the 
Houses of Congress there was (what is by no 
means a foregone conclusion) a majority of the 
President's party. 

Mr. Wilson very quickly showed that the 
energy and determination which had made him 
the real, and not merely nominal, Governor of 
New Jersey, were not going to desert him on 
the wider scene of national politics. He de- 
livered in person his first message to Congress, 
a practice which had the authority of Washing- 
ton and John Adams in its favor, but which 
had fallen into disuse for more than a century. 
Jefferson, an ineffective speaker, had preferred 
to send his messages in writing, and all subse- 
quent Presidents — even the facund Roosevelt — 
had followed his example. The first measure 
on which the new President insisted was, of 
course, a drastic downward revision of the 
tariff; and this was duly effected, though not 
without difficulty. At the same time, in order 
to make good the loss of revenue involved in 
the freeing of many articles, and lowering of 
the duties on others, advantage was taken of a 
new Amendment to the Constitution, and a 
small Federal income-tax was imposed. Scarcely 



THE WHITE HOUSE 67 

less important than the revision of the tariff was 
a Currency Bill, the purpose of which the Presi- 
dent thus expounded: 

It is absolutely imperative that we should give the 
business men of this country a banking and currency 
system by means of which they can make use of the 
freedom of enterprise and of individual initiative which 
we are about to bestow on them. . . . We must have 
a currency, not rigid as now, but readily, elastically 
responsive to sound credit. . . . Our banking laws 
must mobilize reserves, must not permit the concen- 
tration anywhere in a few hands of the monetary re- 
sources of the country, or their use for speculative 
purposes in such volume as to hinder or impede or 
stand in the way of other more legitimate, more fruit- 
ful uses. 

The effect of the bill — which was carried 
against vigorous opposition, mainly by the per- 
sonal incentive of the President — was to estab- 
lish a new system of Federal Reserve Banks, 
under the control of a Federal Reserve Board 
at Washington, directed by the Secretary of 
the Treasury and the Comptroller of Currency. 
It is said to have proved itself already a very 
remarkable success. " The banking organs," 
says Mr. H. J. Ford, " which started out ty 



68 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

treating the Act as a thing of very doubtful 
value, gradually swung around to the position 
of favoring an extension of its scope. . . . 
Whatever bitterness or resentment was left 
after the Act was swept away by the outbreak 
of the European War. The thought that the 
country might have had to face the financial 
disturbance caused by that event with no more 
facilities than the crazy old system supplied was 
simply appalling." 

These were the principal measures of Mr. 
Wilson's first year of office. The second year, 
1914, saw a more direct attack upon the 
monopolies. A blow was struck against " inter- 
locking directorships," * a Federal Trade Com- 
mission was established, and an Act was passed 
which strengthened the hands of an injured 
party under the existing and anti-trust laws, 
defined certain abuses, discriminations and re- 
straints of trade, and legalized the boycott in 

* " After the report of a Congressional Committee on money- 
combines," says Mr. Wilson Harris, " the members of the great 
financial house of Morgan resigned thirty directorships of rail- 
road and other companies, including New York Central and other 
Vanderbilt lines, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the 
United States Steel Corporation, the Guaranty and other Trust 
Companies, and the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing 
Company." 



THE WHITE HOUSE 69 

labor disputes. On the whole, when the war 
broke out, Mr. Wilson was in a fair way to 
redeem the pledges he had given, with regard to 
domestic policy. He had at any rate taken his 
place, once for all, among those Presidents 
whose personality has been powerful enough to 
override the hampering provisions of the Con- 
stitution, and impress itself deeply upon the 
nation's history. 

The Democrats are sometimes called the 
Radicals of America, and Mr. Wilson's policy 
has been both praised and condemned for its 
radicalism. Surely with very insufficient reason. 
The radical solution of the problem of the 
Trusts would be the Socialist solution ; and none 
other is radical. But Mr. Wilson is as far from 
coquetting with Socialism as any Trust magnate 
in America. He is an individualist to the back- 
bone. Free competition is his watchword. It 
is because the Trusts strangle competition that 
he is their enemy. They prevent youthful 
energy and ability from obtaining the capital 
necessary for starting a competitive enterprise; 
and if by chance it is started, they " freeze it 
out " through their control of the subsidiary 
services on which trade and manufacture de-l 



70 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

pend. Of the wastefulness of competition Mr. 
Wilson has no fear. He does not for a moment 
consider the pohcy of taking over the Trusts 
(with the economies they undoubtedly effect or 
might effect) and working them for the benefit 
of the people. The word " nationalization " 
finds no place in his vocabulary. He would have 
private enterprise open to national or state in- 
spection, but he is quite at one with the mass 
of his countrymen in his instinctive distaste for 
national or municipal enterprise. He will go 
so far (we have seen) as to lay it down that 
"Property is an instrument of humanity: hu- 
manity isn't an instrument of property " ; but 
he steers clear of all criticism of the merits of 
private property as an instrument of human 
welfare. He insists on the conservation of na- 
tional resources not already monopolized; but 
monopolization already effected is in his eyes 
sacred. Prescription he accepts as establishing 
not only a legal but a moral title. He is all for 
" the right of the Government to go down into 
the mines to see whether human beings are prop- 
erly treated in them or not; to see whether 
accidents are properly safeguarded against; to 
see whether modern economical methods of using 



THE WHITE HOUSE 71 

these inestimable riches of the earth are followed 
or are not followed " — but, though the insistence 
on " economical methods " of operation would 
seem to be an encroachment on the rights of 
private property, the idea of resuming for the 
nation " these inestimable riches " is never for 
a moment mooted. 

So much by way, not of criticism, but of 
definition. It seemed well to point out the 
limits of Mr. Wilson's radicalism. If he had 
shown the least inclination to dally with Social- 
ism, he would never have been President of the 
United States, for he would not have been the 
representative American he undoubtedly is. In 
that fact lies the source of his strength. He 
stands at the head of the best American political 
thought — but he does not outstrip it. An ideal- 
ist he is ; but both by constitution and conviction 
he holds that it is the part of political sanity to 
work for practicable ideals. He does not waste 
time on speculating as to what may lie beyond 
the horizon. 

It was fated, however, that during Mr. Wil- 
son's tenure of office, foreign affairs should 
absorb the attention of the country, almost to 
the exclusion of even the most urgent questions 



n THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

of domestic policy; and in relation to foreign 
affairs the constitution gives the President al- 
most unlimited powers. One extremely difficult 
problem — that of Mexico — confronted him from 
the very first. It put his qualities as a states- 
man to the most searching test: and many 
people held that he failed to rise to the occasion. 
Let us see whether this view can be maintained. 



VI 

MEXICO 

Nothing in President Wilson's career has been 
more bitterly criticized, both in his own country 
and abroad, than his treatment of the Mexican 
problem. It is probable that when the time for 
dispassionate judgment arrives, nothing will be 
found to give clearer evidence of his strength of 
character and his political insight. 

The problem was indescribably complex and 
thorny. After casting off the yoke of Spain in 
1824, Mexico had passed through half a century 
of revolution upon revolution. In that space of 
time, says Mr. Wilson Harris, " it could boast 
of fifty-two presidents or dictators, one emperor 
and one regent, most of whom met violent 
deaths at the hands of their successors." At 
last, in 1876, the Presidency fell to General 
Porfirio Diaz, one of the leaders of the revolt 
against the ill-fated Maximilian. A man of 

73 



74 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

ruthless will and great executive ability, he 
established what his admirers have described 
as a benevolent despotism, which endured for 
thirty-five years. His benevolence, unfortu- 
nately, was lavished upon foreign capitalists 
rather than upon the people from whose ranks 
he had risen. He gave the country peace, and 
he gave it statistical prosperity. Year by year 
the spread of railroads, the growth of mining 
and manufactures, the increase of exports and 
imports, called forth the ecstatic comments of 
the financial Press. But this effect was at- 
tained by the simple process of giving away with 
both hands, mainly to foreign concessionaires, 
the magnificent resources of the country. For 
the condition of the people Don Porfirio cared 
nothing. Education was neglected, labor trou- 
bles were suppressed with a relentless hand, 
which, on at least one occasion, did not stop 
short of massacre. The appearance of law and 
order was maintained by the exercise of an 
unscrupulous and often cruel despotism. 
Though Diaz was not personally corrupt — he 
does not seem to have enriched himself beyond 
a reasonable measure — he was surrounded by a 
band of politicians, known as the cientificos, for 



MEXICO 75 

whom even this moderate claim cannot be ad- 
vanced. He went to the opposite extreme from 
his contemporary, Paul Kruger. The one 
fought to the death against the development of 
his country by outside enterprise ; the other held 
out every possible inducement to foreign ex- 
ploitation. 

At last the " benevolent despotism " became 
unendurable, and a large party rose against it, 
under the leadership of Francisco Madero, a 
member of a great landowning family. A well- 
meaning idealist of no conspicuous ability, Ma- 
dero succeeded in putting Diaz to flight, and 
was duly elected President. But tranquillity 
was never really restored ; and a fortnight before 
Woodrow Wilson's inauguration Madero was 
murdered, and a rebel leader named Victoriano 
Huerta declared himself President. 

The moment he assumed office, then, Wilson 
found himself confronted with a very knotty 
question: should Huerta be recognized? The 
foreigners in Mexico, who had suffered great 
losses, and endured not a few perils, during the 
disturbances, answered almost unanimously in 
the affirmative. They seem to have hoped that 
Huerta might prove another Diaz — less civilized 



76 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

and even less scrupulous, but capable of main- 
taining order with an iron hand. European 
Governments took this view and recognized the 
usurper: Wilson, in face of the most urgent 
pressure, resolutely declined to do so. He was 
too faithful to democratic principle to employ 
the prestige of the United States in buttressing 
a blood-stained tyranny; and he probably 
thought, with reason, that, even if he were 
tempted to do so, the tyranny could not long 
maintain itself. In other words he did not want 
a new and more ruffianly Diaz, and did not be- 
lieve that, even if he had wanted him, he could 
have found him in Huerta. 

The advocates of a " strong " policy were not 
reconciled to what they considered Mr. Wilson's 
infirmity of purpose when he cordially accepted 
a proposal made by the A.B.C. states of South 
America — Argentine, Brazil, Chile — for joint 
mediation in Mexico. This was regarded by 
his critics as an unworthy condescension, and a 
shirking of responsibility which the United 
States ought to have faced alone. A confer- 
ence assembled at Niagara — on Canadian soil — 
in May, 1914. It did not lead to definite action, 
but certainly promoted a good understanding 



MEXICO 77 

between the Powers of the South and the great 
Power of the North. 

Meanwhile chaos reigned in Mexico, where 
two other guerilla leaders, Carranza and Villa, 
were making war upon Huerta. The arrest by 
Huertists, in April, 1914, of a landing-party 
of American sailors led to a serious complica- 
tion, and the port of Vera Cruz was occupied 
by an American force, and held (not without 
loss) till reparation was made. Huerta soon 
found his position untenable, and fled the coun- 
try, leaving it in the hands of three rival Presi- 
dents, Carranza, Villa, and Zapata. In August, 
1914, a conference of representatives of Latin- 
American states met, by Mr. Wilson's invita- 
tion, at Washington, and joint Pan-American 
intervention was agreed upon, if, within three 
months, affairs in Mexico had not taken a de- 
cided turn for the better. But now it seemed 
that Carranza was actually gaining the upper 
hand, and had a fair prospect of restoring peace 
and order. Mr. Wilson decided to recognize 
his Government; but the hopes founded upon 
his success proved vain. The next incident was 
an irruption by the bandit Villa into American 
territory. This necessitated the dispatch of a 



78 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

punitive expedition under General Pershing, 
which was unable to round up the offender — a 
practically impossible feat — and was vehe- 
mently resented by Carranza. Thus the action 
of President Wilson's Government seemed fated 
to appear inglorious and ineffectual. The pacifi- 
cation of Mexico remained — and remains — unac- 
complished ; and the " interests " which suffered 
not unnaturally laid the blame upon the " pusil- 
lanimity," the " vacillation," the " opportunism " 
of the President's policy. 

Never were terms at once so specious and so 
utterly misapplied. It is not pusillanimity and 
vacillation, but magnanimity and constancy, that 
pursues an unpopular and unimpressive course 
merely because it happens that, on a calm bal- 
ancing of the consequences, the only possible 
alternative is seen to be disastrous. What was 
the alternative to President Wilson's policy? 
It could only have been, in the first place, a 
great and bloody war. All parties in ^lexico — 
as was clear from the declarations of Madero 
and the action of Carranza — would have made 
common cause against an invader, and the 
United States would have had on their hands a 
problem vaster and more difficult than that 



MEXICO 79 

which Britain encountered in South Africa. In 
the second place, this war would have worn the 
appearance, at any rate, of a war of conquest, 
and would have alienated once for all the other 
Spanish- American states, already sufficiently 
prone to question the disinterestedness of their 
great neighbor of the North. In the third place, 
the utmost success attainable would have left 
the United States saddled with the charge of 
a vassal republic, resentful, turbulent, entirely 
indisposed to accept and profit by the tutelage 
of its conqueror. It would have had to be 
controlled, for a long time at any rate, by 
American proconsuls, who, if they acted hon- 
estly in the interests of the people, could not 
possibly have revived the system of exploitation 
which had flourished under Diaz, and which 
was the very thing that those who clamored for 
intervention were longing to see revived. All 
this President Wilson saw; and we can scarcely 
doubt that, after August, 1914, he was more and 
more convinced that, when the larger interests 
of his country and of humanity were inextrica- 
bly involved in the European War, it would be 
madness for the United States to tie themselves 
up in a local complication which would absorb 



80 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

their energies for years, and from which no 
really satisfactory issue was within the horizon 
of practical politics. When civilization and 
order reign on one side of a frontier and chaotic 
semi-barbarism on the other, there is always a 
great temptation for the civilized Power to ste]; 
in and restore with the strong hand — or, in more 
modern parlance, with " the big stick " — tran- 
quillity and the reign of law. Nor is it to be 
doubted that there are occasions when such a 
course of action is justified. But history will 
probably hold with President Wilson that this 
was not one of these occasions. Effective inter- 
vention would have forced upon the United 
States a part which neither their principles nor 
the form of their polity fitted them to play. 
It would have compromised instead of confirm- 
ing the position to which they naturally aspired 
of " primus inter pares " among the republics 
of the New World. It would for a time have 
made bad worse in Mexico, and might in the 
end have retarded rather than hastened the paci- 
fication of the country and the establishment of 
true self-government, as distinct from an autoc- 
racy working (when it suited its convenience) 
under a thin pretense of republican forms. 



MEXICO 81 

In a conjuncture in which the only choice 
lies, not between good and evil, but between 
two degrees of ill, the wise course and the brave 
course is to choose the lesser degree, even if the 
choice seem a tame and unheroic one. And to 
persist in that choice in the face of bitter, violent 
and contemptuous criticism may well be the 
truly heroic part to play. 



VII 

INTO THE WAR 

It is not my intention to write a history of the 
various phases of President Wilson's action with 
regard to the European war. A mere summary 
of the details would be tedious, while a full dis- 
cussion of the various issues involved would run 
into volumes. My purpose is merely to survey 
the conditions which inevitably shaped the Presi- 
dent's policy — conditions which some of his 
critics on this side of the Atlantic do not even 
now fully realize. 

Though the President of the United States 
is mainly responsible for the conduct of the for- 
eign affairs, it is not he, but Congress, that has 
the final voice in choosing between peace and 
war. This means that it is literally impossible 
for the President to declare war unless he has 
the country, as represented by Congress, behind 
him. But this technical impossibility was only 
the outward and visible sign of a more deep- 



INTO THE WAR 83 

seated impediment to any early and prompt 
intervention in the European struggle. It was 
possible that, in a moment of excitement, such 
as that which followed the Lusitania outrage, 
a snatch vote of Congress might have sanctioned 
war; but that would have been of little use 
unless the real heart of the people had sanc- 
tioned the vote of Congress. America possessed 
no ready-made military machine that could be 
set in motion at the touch of a button. The 
machine had to be created; and how could it be 
created if the heart of the people were not in 
the effort? Merely nominal intervention, inef- 
fective and impotent, would have been very 
much worse than useless. Every President 
would have felt this; but Mr. Wilson aspired 
to be, and in a very real sense was, peculiarly 
a people's President, representing no class, nor 
region, nor interest, but the people as a whole. 
Without a united nation behind him he could 
not move and he did not wish to move ; and until 
the nation was united, the strictest neutrality 
was not only the correct, but the only wise 
attitude to adopt. 

Was the nation united in the early months 
of the war? Was it united even after the first 



84j the peace-president 

great U-boat crimes — the sinking of the Lusi- 
tania and the Arabic — had revealed the menace 
to civilization involved in German anarchism? 
The only answer to these questions is: certainly 
not. There has seldom been a less united na- 
tion, or one pulled in different ways by a greater 
variety of forces. 

In the first place, about one in eleven of the 
whole population was either born in Germany 
or born in America of German parents. Many 
of these *' hyphenated Americans " were deeply 
infected with the unscrupulous megalomania 
which had impelled Germany upon her reckless 
career; while almost all of them were eager to 
adopt the German legend of a peaceful Empire 
wantonly attacked, and to palliate the crimes of 
Kultur as legitimate measures of self-defense. 
To these nine millions of Germans, or Germans- 
once-removed, must be added large numbers of 
subjects of the Austrian Monarchy: much less 
unanimously devoted to the cause of the Central 
Empires, but still a factor to be reckoned with. 

And what of the Americans who had no actual 
German or Austrian leanings? Was there any 
solidarity of feeling among them? None what- 
ever. A certain number, mostly among the 



INTO THE WAR 85 

cultivated classes in the Eastern States, had 
fairly strong British sympathies; but tradition 
and education had fostered in large numbers 
of the people a vague dislike for England; 
while the powerful Irish element was animated 
by a by no means vague antipathy for the Saxon 
oppressors. 

There was, no doubt, a good deal of tradi- 
tional and sentimental sympathy with France; 
but that was largely counterbalanced by the fact 
that France was engaged in the war as the ally 
of Russian despotism. Nor did Japan's par- 
ticipation in the Alliance tend to make its cause 
more popular in the Western States. 

So much for the groupings begotten of what 
may be called initial sympathies and antipathies. 
What now of the fundamental attitude of the 
American mind towards war in general and 
European war in particular? 

Pacifism, as a quasi-religious doctrine, was at 
least as strong in America as anywhere else in 
the world. It was very active, and very un- 
sophisticated. The naive expedition of the Ford 
Peace Conference to Europe was a characteristic 
expression of a by no means negligible phase 
of American opinion. And doctrinaire pacifism, 



86 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

there as here, inclined its sectaries to refuse to 
draw even the most obvious distinctions as to the 
responsibihty of the different parties to the war. 
All belligerents, by the very fact of their bel- 
ligerency, were, in the eyes of fanaticism, 
equally insane and equally criminal. Fanaticism 
apart, moreover, there was, in the American 
people at large, a wholesome and thoroughly 
well-grounded detestation of the very idea of 
war — a detestation which there can be no doubt 
that President Wilson, as a typical American, 
very cordially shared. They had not, as a 
people, even the secret hankering after military 
glory which lingers, or lingered, in the hearts of 
the great European nations. War was in their 
eyes a last resource, justifiable only in self- 
defense, or, like the Civil War, in defense of 
some great ideal. Above all things, too, their 
national traditions made abstention from Euro- 
pean embroilments almost an article of religion. 
The idea that America should keep herself to 
herself, and not mix in the feuds of the other 
hemisphere, was one of the maxims of political 
sagacity bequeathed to his successors by the 
Father of his Country ; and it was a maxim that 
entirely harmonized with every American in- 



INTO THE WAR S7 

stinct. The Monroe Doctrine, which the pre- 
scription of a century seemed almost to have 
incorporated in the Constitution, was founded 
on the principle of non-intervention. America 
could not well say " hands off " to Europe with- 
out subscribing to a reciprocal self-denying ordi- 
nance. Thus every accepted tenet of political 
wisdom reinforced the inborn peaceableness of 
the national disposition, and rendered it doubly 
difficult to conceive that it could possibly be the 
duty of the Western Republic to plunge itself 
into a contest arising from the rancors and 
cupidities of European monarchies and empires. 

To all these reasons for quietude and absten- 
tion must be added the sheer lack of interest in 
the war felt by large sections of the American 
public. It was to them an insensate and san- 
guinary spectacle played out on a far distant 
scene — a spectacle which simply shocked them, 
and in which they could feel no personal con- 
cern. Battles in Europe did not seem to come 
home to them much more directly than battles 
in the moon. This factor of sheer indifference 
was not the least potent with which President 
Wilson had to lay his account. 

And even if the obstacles to intervention had 



SS THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

been less formidable — even if he himself had 
felt less strongly that war is justified only when 
every means of avoiding it has been tried — 
there was yet another reason which impelled 
President Wilson to keep his country out of the 
mellay to the last possible moment. It was 
manifestly to the advantage of the world that, 
if it could be done without disgrace, one great 
Power should hold aloof from the sanguinary 
welter, should devote itself to the mitigation of 
suffering, and should be in a position to mediate 
between the combatants, as soon as the time 
should be ripe for such a service. Mr. Wilson 
did not forget the part played by Mr. Roosevelt 
in bringing the Russo-Japanese war to a close. 
It was clearly incumbent on him, if it could be 
reconciled with higher interests, to hold himself 
in readiness for the congenial function of the 
peacemaker. This was not the least of motives 
impelling him to hold indignation, however 
righteous, in check, and make patience his 
watchword even to the eleventh hour. 

But if this was the line of conduct prescribed 
for him alike by personal principle and by 
official duty, it was plain that his only reason- 
able course was to maintain the strictest neu- 



INTO THE WAR 89 

trality both in language and in action. What- 
ever were his personal sympathies, to have al- 
lowed them to appear in his utterances would 
have been both futile and improper. It was his 
business to speak, not his own mind, but the 
mind of America. It was his business to ex- 
press, as nearly as possible, the ideas common to 
all American minds, not to make himself the 
mouthpiece of the partisanship of any one sec- 
tion. Nay more — it was his duty to urge mod- 
eration upon the more vehement partisans of 
every color, and not, if he could help it, to let 
the indiscretion of individuals frustrate the 
policy on which he had deliberately resolved, and 
for the successful carrying-through of which he 
was responsible. If these considerations be 
borne in mind, the bitter criticism which some 
of his utterances evoked on both sides of the 
Atlantic will appear to have been founded on 
an imperfect apprehension of the elements of 
an exceedingly complex problem. One or two 
of the phrases he employed may be open to 
verbal objection; but the defect, if defect there 
be, is generally due to over scrupulousness in 
keeping within the limits of the part imposed 
upon him by the situation and by his office. 



90 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

The phrase " too proud to fight," used a few 
days after the Lusitania catastrophe, was cer- 
tainly unfortunate. It expressed nothing of 
great importance and it invited misunderstand- 
ing. Its context ran as follows: 

The example of America must be a special example, 
and must be an example not merely of peace because it 
will not fight, but because peace is a healing and elevat- 
ing influence of the world, and strife is not. There is 
such a thing as a man being too proud to fight ; there 
is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does 
not need to convince others by force that it is right. 

The expression was casual and illustrative, 
a mere obiter dictum; but at such a juncture 
even obiter dicta ought to be carefully weighed 
lest they prove stumbling-blocks to understand- 
ing. It was a trifling literary lapse, thrown 
into wholly disproportionate prominence by the 
circumstances. 

Another expression much dwelt upon by the 
President's critics occurred in a speech on the 
League to Enforce Peace, delivered on May 
27th, 1916: 

With its [the war's] causes and objects we are not 
concerned. The obscure fountains from which the stu- 



INTO THE WAR 91 

pendous flood has burst forth we are not interested to 
search for or explore. 



What is this but an absolately obligatory 
declaration of neutrality? So long as America 
was neutral, it was not her business, as a nation, 
to sit in judgment, to investigate the causes of 
the war or determine what ought to be its ob- 
jects. The League to Enforce Peace was not 
being projected as a partisan organization, but 
claimed to be equally beneficent and necessary 
whatever might be the rights and wrongs of the 
struggle. The expression " we are not inter- 
ested " was perhaps ill chosen. It suggested 
private indifference rather than national impar- 
tiality. But apart from that the passage was 
merely the disclaimer of biassed motives which 
his position imposed on the head of a neutral 
state. 

There is some excuse, however, for the objec- 
tion taken on the side of the Allies to both these 
passages. On the other hand, there seems to be 
no excuse for the outcry which greeted the fol- 
lowing paragraph in the note of December 20th, 
1916, suggesting to the belligerents that the time 
had come for negotiation : 



92 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

He [the President] takes the liberty of calling atten- 
tion to the fact that the objects which the statesmen of 
the belligerents on both sides have in mind in this war 
are virtually the same, as stated in general terms to 
their own people and to the world. Each side desires 
to make the rights and privileges of weak peoples and 
small states as secure against aggression or denial in 
the future as the rights and privileges of the great and 
powerful states now at war. 

Surely the irony of this passage ought to have 
been apparent from the first. It states a literal 
fact, for German professions " as stated in 
general terms," were full of nobility and sym- 
pathy for the oppressed. Had not Bethmann- 
Hollweg expressed the willingness of Germany 
to " place herself at the head " of a League of 
Peace? Had not Germany's sympathetic heart- 
strings been wrung by the atrocious conduct of 
the Allies towards Greece and other small na- 
tions? It was of these professions that the 
President was officially cognizant — what could 
he do, in a note addressed to both the contending 
parties, but take them at their face value? And 
this he did all the more readily, no doubt, be- 
cause the contrast between Germany's profes- 
sions and the flagrant and abominable facts 



INTO THE WAR 93 

gave 10 the very suavity of his language a tinge 
of the bitterest irony. Here one cannot but 
suggest that the President has a right to re- 
proach his critics with a certain slowness of 
apprehension. 

When we pass from the consideration of 
words to deeds, the strictures sometimes passed 
on the President's action are seen, when all the 
circumstances are considered, to have even less 
foundation. 

No one, surely, can suggest that America 
should have entered the war in the autumn of 
1914, in exasperation at the German treatment 
of Belgium. She could not have prevented or 
in any way checked the crime; and it was pre- 
cisely by keeping out of the war that she was 
able to some extent to mitigate the lot of the 
martyr country. Nor would it have helped to 
make the crime the subject of an official protest. 
This even Mr. Roosevelt admitted at the time. 
" Sympathy," he wrote, " is compatible with 
full acknowledgment of the unwisdom of our 
uttering a single word of official protest unless 
we are prepared to make that protest effective; 
and only the clearest and most urgent na- 
tional duty would ever justify us in deviating 



d4 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

from our role of neutrality and non-interference." 
Not quite so clear, perhaps, are the merits of 
the President's action in the case of the Lusi- 
tania; but can any one, looking back on the 
course of events, seriously maintain that Mr. 
Wilson would have done wisely in attempting 
to rush his country into war on this issue? In 
so doing he would have obeyed the dictates of 
national passion, not of national honor and a 
reasoned regard to the welfare of the world. 
The war would have been practically a war of 
revenge,* undertaken, in the spirit of antique 
superstition, for the appeasement of the ghosts 
of the American victims. To make even the 
murder of 113 American citizens a reason for 
war without parley would have been wholly 
opposed to the very principle for which Amer- 
ica is fighting to-day : the principle that methods 
of peace must be exhausted before arms are 
brought into play. This is the corner-stone of 

* He could not have said then, as he said when the time came to 
take up Germany's challenge : — " The choice we make for ourselves 
must be made with the moderation of counsel and temperateness 
of judgment befitting our character and motives as a nation. We 
must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or 
the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but 
only a vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a 
single champion. 



INTO THE WAR 95 

the new world-order for which the Allies are 
contending. Are we to blame President Wilson 
because he did not suffer even the horror en- 
gendered by an unexampled atrocity to render 
him oblivious of the first article in his, and our, 
creed ? 

A headlong plunge into war would not have 
brought the Lusitania victims to life again, 
and it would have put an end to the last chance 
of inducing Germany to obey the dictates of 
international law and humanity in her conduct 
of the war at sea. The chance of doing so 
might not at best be great, but President Wilson 
had not the right to leave it untested. He had 
to deal in negotiation with an utterly insincere, 
evasive and cynical adversary; but he did actu- 
ally obtain a qualified confession of wrong- 
doing in the case of the Lusitania, a disavowal 
of the Arabic outrage, and a promise that the 
rules of humanity should not be wholly set at 
defiance. He himself, in his Address to Con- 
gress of April 2nd, 1917, summed up the prac- 
tical result of his efforts. " The Imperial Gov- 
ernment," he said, " had somewhat restrained 
the commanders of its under-sea craft in con- 
formity with its promise," given in April, 1916, 



96 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

" that passenger boats should not be sunk, and 
due warning should be given to all other ves- 
sels," so that their crews might have at least 
a fair chance of saving their lives. " The pre- 
cautions were meager and haphazard enough, as 
was proved in distressing instance after instance 
in the progress of the cruel and unmanly busi- 
ness, but a certain degree of restraint was ob- 
served." The attempt, by methods of reason, to 
make the German Government honest and hu- 
mane was in the long run a hopeless one; but 
that could only be ascertained by experiment. 
In a controversy in which the bad faith of one of 
the parties is impudently displayed, patience in 
the other party cannot but have an air of pusil- 
lanimity. Again and again President Wilson 
was urged by onlookers, both at home and 
abroad, to " Call him a liar and make it a fight," 
and was taunted with spiritlessness and irresolu- 
tion when he quietly ignored the advice. Never, 
perhaps, was his strength of character more 
clearly shown than in the calmness with which 
he pursued his well-considered course, unmoved 
by impatient and uncomprehending criticism. 
However exasperating might be the recurrent 
instances of German effrontery, he knew that 



INTO THE WAR 97 

he had not a compulsive case to lay before the 
mass of the American people; and he felt that 
to be the one indispensable condition of effective 
intervention. 

As 1916 wore on, moreover, and the Presi- 
dential election drew nearer, he naturally be- 
came more and more unwilling to commit the 
country, without absolute necessity, to a vast 
enterprise which he himself might be unable to 
carry through. It ought clearly to be a point 
of honor in an outgoing official to take no 
momentous and irrevocable step which may im- 
pose upon his successor a responsibility which 
he may not desire, and to which, indeed, he may 
be unequal. 

But in the meantime, as no one knew better 
than President Wilson, events were educating 
the country and proving that the aloofness on 
which Washington and INIonroe had based their 
conception of a national policy was in very deed 
a thing of the past. Germany kindly under- 
took the task of arousing the American people 
to a sense of danger and a sense of duty. No 
one can deny her the praise of being a highly 
efficient educator in the dread and detestation 
of Germanism. The duplicity of her profes- 



98 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

sions, no less than the ruffianism of her acts, 
aroused an ever growing resentment, which was 
not allayed by the tactless importunacy of her 
propaganda. Her accredited diplomatic repre- 
sentatives were found to be carrying on active 
warfare against American industry, and intrigu- 
ing to involve the United States in domestic 
and foreign complications. These illicit and 
underground courses led to the loss of many 
American lives and to great destruction of prop- 
erty. One by one the agents of the Central 
Empires outstayed their welcome and were po- 
litely required to withdraw. The intolerable 
conduct of the official propagandist, Dernburg, 
after the sinking of the Lusitania, led to his 
prompt elimination; and he was followed by 
Boy-Ed, the German naval attache. Von Papen, 
the military attache, and Dr. Dumba, the Aus- 
trian Ambassador. At the same time events on 
the Mexican frontier were arousing the country 
to a sense of its inability to make its full 
strength, or a tenth part of its full strength, felt 
in any crisis calling for military action. A great 
" preparedness " campaign, in which President 
Wilson took a prominent part, was a result of 
all these converging influences, and accustomed 



INTO THE WAR 99 

people to the idea that neither the Atlantic nor 
the Pacific now afforded them the old security 
from aggression. They might be called upon at 
any moment to defend their property or to vin- 
dicate their honor. Whether they liked it or 
not, they were members of the commonweal of 
nations, and must be prepared to play a part 
in world-politics worthy of their traditions and 
their ideals. If need be, they must step in to 
save the nascent world-democracy from falling 
a victim to an autocratic-militarist coup d'etat. 
In November, 1916, after a neck-and-neck 
race against a strong competitor, Charles Evans 
Hughes, ex-Governor of New York, President 
Wilson was elected to a second term of office. 
His position was thus enormously strengthened. 
In 1912, the international sky, if not unclouded, 
had threatened no such tornado as that which 
had burst upon the world. He had been elected 
on purely domestic issues, and had no direct 
mandate to deal with the momentous question 
of peace or war. Now he held the mandate. 
The country knew what to expect of him, and 
the country chose him. He had been patient, — 
indeed many thousands of those who voted 
against him had doubtless done so because they 



100 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

thought he had been too patient — but he had 
shown unmistakably that his patience was not 
without limits. He had said, when the policy 
of submarine piracy had been first announced, 
that if the lives of American citizens were lost, 
" the United States would be constrained to 
hold the Imperial Government of Germany to 
strict accountability " ; and though he seemed to 
have put a lax interpretation on that term, the 
principle he had laid down was clear, and any 
one who voted for him must have known that 
a time might come when the only possible 
method of calling Germany to account would be 
the method of arms. As time went on, more- 
over, Mr. Wilson had been more and more em- 
phatic in his warnings to his fellow-countrymen 
that their position was no longer one of unas- 
sailable security, and that they might at any 
moment find it necessary to make great sacrifices 
in order to avert still greater dangers which 
threatened not only their own country, but the 
democratic idea throughout the world. He had 
said: 

America was born into the world to do mankind 
service, and no man is an American in whom the desire 
to do mankind service does not take precedence over 



INTO THE WAR 101 

the desire to serve himself. If I believed that the 
might of America was any threat to any free man in 
the world, I would wish America to be weak. But I 
believe the might of America is the might of righteous 
purpose and of a sincere love for the freedom of man- 
kind. 

And again he had said : 

There are two things which practically everybody 
who comes to the Executive office at Washington tells 
me. They tell me, " The people are counting upon you 
to keep us out of this war," and in the next breath 
what do they tell me : " People are equally counting 
upon you to maintain the honor of the United States." 
Have you reflected that a time might come when I 
could not do both? And have you made yourself ready 
to stand behind your Government for the maintenance 
of the honor of the country, as well as for the peace 
of the country .? 

The man who had held this language, and 
who had had his tenure of power renewed by 
the people to whom it was addressed, could not 
doubt that his countrymen had full confidence 
in his judgment as to the time to strike and the 
time to refrain from striking. 

When at last, at the end of January, 1917, 
Germany decided to stake everything upon the 



102 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

chance of bringing the Allies to their knees by 
a campaign of " unrestricted " maritime murder, 
Mr. Wilson saw that the time for patience was 
past. Without a moment's hesitation, he sev- 
ered diplomatic relations with Berlin. He still 
hoped, he tells us, that the United States need 
not go beyond " armed neutrality " — that is to 
say, the defensive armament of merchant ship- 
ping. But that hope proved vain when Ger- 
many intimated that " the armed guards placed 
on merchant ships would be treated as beyond 
the pale of the law and dealt with as pirates." 
Meanwhile the overthrow of the Russian autoc- 
racy had removed the one final objection felt 
by many Americans to making common cause 
with the Allies. On April 2nd, the President 
summoned an Extraordinary Session of Con- 
gress, and, in an address which will be remem- 
bered in history, recommended that war should 
be declared against Germany. 

" The world-war," he said, " was determined upon as 
wars used to be determined upon in the old unhappy 
days, when peoples were nowhere consulted by their 
rulers, and wars were provoked and waged in the inter- 
est of dynasties, or little groups of ambitious men, who 
were accustomed to use their fellow-men as pawns and 



INTO THE WAR 103 

tools. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor 
States with spies, or set in course an intrigue to bring 
about some critical posture of affairs which would give 
them an opportunity to strike and make a conquest. 
Such designs can be successfully worked only under 
cover, where no one has a right to ask questions. Cun- 
ningly-contrived plans of deception or impression, car- 
ried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be 
worked out and kept from light only within the privacy 
of Courts, or behind the carefully-guarded confidences 
of a narrow privileged class. They are happily impos- 
sible where public opinion commands and insists upon 
full information concerning all the nation's affairs. 
A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained 
except by the partnership of democratic nations. No 
autocratic Government could be trusted to keep faith 
within it or observe its covenants. 

" It is, unhappily, not a matter of conjecture, but 
of fact, proved in our courts of justice, that intrigues 
which more than once came perilously near disturbing 
the peace and dislocating the industries of the country 
have been carried on at the instigation, with the sup- 
port, and even under the personal direction, of official 
agents of the Imperial Government accredited to the 
Government of the United States. Even in checking 
these things and trying to extirpate them, we have 
sought to put the most generous interpretation possible 
upon them, because we knew that their source lay not 
in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German people 
towards us (who were, no doubt, as ignorant of them 



104 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

as ourselves), but only in selfish designs of a Govern- 
ment that did what it pleased, and told its people 
nothing. But they played their part in serving to 
convince us at last that that Government entertains 
no real friendship for us, and means to act against 
our peace and security at its convenience. 

" We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose 
because we know that in such a Government, following 
such methods, we can never have a friend, and that in 
the presence of its organized power, always lying in 
wait to accomplish we know not what purpose, there 
can be no assured security for the democratic govern- 
ments of the world. We are about to accept the gage 
of battle with this natural foe to liberty, and we shall, 
if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to 
check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are 
glad, now that we see facts with no veil of false pretense 
about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the 
world, for the liberation of its peoples — the German 
peoples included — the rights of nations, great and 
small, and the privilege of men everywhere to choose 
their way of life and obedience. The world must be 
made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted 
upon trusted foundations of political liberty. 

" It is a fearful thing to lead this great and peaceful 
people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous 
of all wars. Civilization itself seems to be in the bal- 
ance, but right is more precious than peace, and we 
shall fight for the things which we have always carried 
nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of 



INTO THE WAR 105 

those who submit to authority to have a voice in their 
own government, for the rights and liberties of small 
nations, for the universal dominion of right by such 
a concert of free peoples as will bring peace and safety 
to all nations, and make the world itself at last free. To 
such a task we can dedicate our lives, our fortunes, 
everything we are, everything we have, with the pride 
of those who know the day has come when America 
is privileged to spend her blood and might for the 
principles that gave her birth, and the happiness and 
peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she 
can do no other." 

Never did nation go to war from purer mo- 
tives of world-citizenship; never were a nation's 
motives more nobly worded than in this great 
utterance. 

There are people who think that they have 
condemned, or at all events belittled, Mr. Wil- 
son's conduct when they say that he kept his 
country out of the war to the last possible mo- 
ment, and only brought her in when American 
interests were seriously attacked by the unre- 
stricted submarine campaign. They forget that 
the President of the United States is neither an 
autocrat nor a knight-errant, and that it would 
be worse than foolish for him to attempt to play 
either part. No doubt it would have been a fine 



106 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

melodramatic gesture to have thrown down the 
gage of battle on behalf of martyred Belgium, 
and declared America the champion of good- 
faith and of humanity whenever or wherever 
they are outraged. But even if he had had the 
right to make that gesture, it would in all 
probability have had no practical effect, for the 
country would not have stood solidly behind it. 
So far was it from being of one mind that the 
President had enough to do to resist the efforts 
of German partisans to force him into the non- 
neutral course of forbidding the export of muni- 
tions, because the Allies alone were in a position 
to avail themselves of this source of supply. 
Had he been a weak or pusillanimous man, or 
even a fanatical peace-lover, he would have 
found plenty of support in making timely con- 
cessions to German arrogance and brutality, and 
keeping out of the war altogether. His atti- 
tude, though patient, was always firm^j-so much 
so as to lose him the co-operation of his Secre- 
tary of State, Mr. Bryan. When in 1916 there 
was an agitation to keep out of trouble with 
Germany by forbidding American citizens to 
sail on the defensively-armed liners of the Allies, 
Mr. Wilson crushed it with a firm hand. He 



INTO THE WAR 107 

wrote to Senator Stone, Chairman of the For- 
eign Relations Committee of the Senate: 

To forbid our people to exercise their rights for fear 
we might be called upon to vindicate them would be 
a deep humiliation indeed. It would be an implicit, 
all but explicit, acquiescence in the violation of the 
rights of mankind everywhere, and of whatever nation 
or allegiance. 

He would not even suffer the resolution to 
be quietly shelved, but insisted that it should be 
brought before Congress and voted on. Every- 
where his conduct was that of a strong, straight- 
forward man — strong enough to pursue what he 
conceived to be the path of duty, even when he 
knew that in doing so he must incur grave mis- 
understanding and bitter misrepresentation. 

Nor is it true that he brought America into 
the war because her material " interests " were 
threatened. They were, as a matter of fact, in 
little more danger than they had been ever since 
early in 1915. At all events, any " material " 
loss that might have been caused by unrestricted 
piracy was infinitesimal in comparison with the 
inevitable costs of a war in which America, as 
he declared from the outset, sought no conquests 



108 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

and no indemnities. He carried his country into 
the war because Germany had thrown to the 
winds that last semblance of regard for interna- 
tional law or humanity, and because he saw, and 
his countrymen saw, that a world dominated by 
the spirit of German autocracy was an impossi- 
ble world for a self-respecting and self-govern- 
ing people to live in. Until it was absolutely 
clear that the very existence of democracy was 
at stake, he did not think that he had the right, 
even if he had had the power, to involve his 
country in the gigantic evils of war. He had 
borne injury and covert insult while that seemed 
the lesser of two evils; but when open insult to 
the United States was combined with a no less 
cynical disavowal of all restraint in the pursuit 
of the interests of Germany's ruling caste, he 
saw that with that caste no free man or free 
nation could live at peace. He declared for 
war, and the country rose at his summons. He 
had throughout played the part of a resolute, 
far-seeing, plain-speaking, democratic states- 
man; in the final moment of decision he proved 
himself a great leader of men. 



VIII 

PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 

It was a frequent, perhaps a constant, practice 
among the Greeks, after a victory, to review the 
battle and decide who had borne himself the 
most valiantly. But, if one may say so without 
irreverence, it was a very foolish practice. The 
decision could seldom be a just one, and it must 
always have led to futile and unnecessary heart- 
burnings. It would ill become the Allies, who 
have won not only the greatest, but the noblest, 
victory the world ever saw, to decline into un- 
generous bickerings over their respective con- 
tributions to the glorious result. It is especially 
impossible to find any common measure to apply 
to those who bore the burden and heat of the 
day and those who intervened at a late, though 
decisive, moment. All that can or that need be 
said is that the magnificent efi'ort of America, 
inspired and guided by President Wilson, was 

109 



110 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

of literally incalculable value to the cause of 
freedom and humanity. 

And now the great President, among so many 
other and minor tasks, can devote himself to 
what he has all along proclaimed as his ultimate 
ideal — that of securing the initiation of a Society 
of States, whereby collective reason shall be sub- 
stituted for individual violence as the arbiter in 
all disputes between civilized peoples. The idea 
is no new one. Many wise men of old — includ- 
ing Erasmus, Hugo Grotius, the Due de Sully, 
William Penn and Immanuel Kant — have con- 
ceived and propounded it. But the time was not 
ripe: the world was too large and too incom- 
pletely interrelated. It had to acquire the com- 
plex and highly sensitive nervous system of to- 
day before it could develop a collective brain. 
Now the war, which has wrought so many mira- 
cles, can place to its credit this greatest of all: 
it has transmuted the Utopian dream of the past 
into the most pressing and practical necessity 
of the future. Even the Germans realized that 
the devilish ingenuities of science, combined with 
the development of means of communication, 
had led to such an extravagant and illimitable 
increase in the potentialities of destruction, that 



PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 111 

if the conditions of the past half-century were 
to continue for another fifty years, civilization 
must inevitably stagger to ruin and collapse 
under the sheer weight of armaments and mili- 
tary preparations of every sort. There is no 
reason to doubt that the aspirations towards 
world-peace, freely expressed by leading men in 
Germany during the last years of the war, were 
sincere enough. If Germany had won, she 
would have made her own League of Nations — 
but it would have been a league of forcibly dis- 
armed nations under the heel of " Mitteleuropa," 
armed to the teeth. Fate has decided for a 
League of Free Peoples; and many of us see 
in President Wilson our chiefest guarantee for 
its wise and successful organization. 

He has not given his adhesion to any one of 
the dozen or more cut-and-dried schemes that 
are before the world. Whether he has one " up 
his sleeve " remains to be seen. He has em- 
phatically stated the view that the League of 
Nations must be founded at the Peace Confer- 
ence, neither sooner nor later. This may not 
mean, however, that it must actually have its 
constitution sanctioned and its mechanism de- 
vised in every detail. What is essential is that 



112 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

its principle should be accepted, its existence 
assured, and some sort of provisional organiza- 
tion set on foot. That the Conference should 
complete its work without knowing whether the 
League is to exist or not is simply unthinkable. 
Upon the answer to that question must depend 
all the most important details of the settlement. 
Are frontiers to be human — that is, determined 
by race, language, national feeling, economic 
convenience — or are they to be "strategic"? 
Are the nations to banish cupidity and fear, and 
enter into a pact of mutual insurance against a 
renewal of the horrors from which they have 
just emerged? Or are they simply to " ma- 
noeuver for position" in view of the next war? 
Is the peace to be a peace, or only a truce? 
Until that crucial point is decided, the Confer- 
ence will be working in the dark. Strange as 
it may seem, there are forces at work to secure 
a decision in the wrong, the retrograde, sense. 
It is a priceless reassurance to know that almost 
the whole weight of America is in the opposite 
scale. For what other purpose did she enter 
the war but to secure the world-peace of 
democracy ? 

The war has left behind it innumerable sor- 



PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 118 

rows that time itself can never heal. Even the 
exultation of victory is tinged with pain at the 
thought that the people who have brought on 
themselves — and more than merited — so dire a 
disaster, are the inheritors of so noble a birth- 
right, the countrymen of Goethe and Schiller, 
of Bach and Beethoven. But to us, in Eng- 
land, the war has brought one inestimable and 
imperishable joy, in the generous comradeship 
of a reconciled America. Which of us does not 
echo the words of Mr. Winston Churchill at the 
historic 4th of July meeting at Westminster: 

Deep in the hearts of the people of these islands, 
in the hearts of those, who, in the language of the 
Declaration of Independence, are styled " our British 
brethren," lay the desire to be truly reconciled before 
all men and all history with their kindred across the 
Atlantic Ocean, to blot out the reproaches and redeem 
the blunders of a bygone age, to dwell once more in 
spirit with them, to stand once more in battle at their 
side, to create once more a union of hearts, to write 
once more a history in common. That was our hearts' 
desire. It seemed utterly unattainable, but it has come 
to pass. However long, however cruel the struggle 
. . . that complete reconciliation will make amends 
for all. That is the reward of Britain; that is the 
lion's share. 



114 THE PEACE-PRESIDENT 

To the subject of this brief memoir a great 
part of the miracle is due. Had a pedantic or 
a pusillanimous President sat in Woodrow Wil- 
son's seat, it might never have been achieved. 
We owe much to the clumsy intrigues and 
flagrant crimes of Germany; but that is the sort 
of debt that is paid in contempt, not in grati- 
tude. So far as any one man can be called the 
author of the great reconcilement, it is beyond 
all doubt the President who has been so stead- 
fastly and so magnanimously faithful to the 
great traditions of his race. 



APPENDIX 

THE FOURTEEN POINTS 

President Wilson, in his address to Congress, 
following Mr. Lloyd George's definition of Brit- 
ish War Aims of January 5, said on January 8 
1918: 

The programme of the world's peace is our pro- 
gramme, and that programme, the only possible pro- 
gramme as we see it, is this: 

1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after 
which there shall be no private international under- 
standings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed 
always frankly and in the public view. 

2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, 
outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, 
except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by 
mternational action for the enforcement of interna- 
tional covenants. 

3. The removal, as far as possible, of all economic 
barriers, and the establishment of an equality of trade 
conditions among all the nations consenting to the 
peace and associating themselves for its maintenance. 

4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that na- 

115 



116 APPENDIX 

tional armaments will be reduced to the lowest point 
consistent with domestic safety. 

5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial 
I adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict 
J observance of the principle that in determining all such 
questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations 
I concerned must have equal weight with the equitable 
claims of the government whose title is to be determined. 

6. The evacuation of all Russian territory, and such 
a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will 
secure the best and freest cooperation of the other 
nations of the world in obtaining for her an unham- 
pered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independ- 
ent determination of her own political development 
and national policy, and assure her of a sincere welcome 
into the society of free nations under institutions of 
her own choosing ; and, more than a welcome, assistance 
also of every kind that she may need and may herself 
desire. 

7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be 
evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit 
the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all 
other free nations. 

8. All French territory should be freed, and the 
invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France 
by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, 
which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly 
fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may 
once more be made secure in the interest of all. 

9. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should 



APPENDIX 117 

be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nation- 
ality. 

10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place 
among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and as- 
sured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of 
autonomous development. 

11. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be 
evacuated, occupied territories restored, Serbia ac- 
corded free and secure access to the sea, and the rela- 
tions of the several Balkan States to one another deter- 
mined by friendly counsel along historically established 
lines of allegiance and nationality, and international 
guarantees of the political and economic independence 
and territorial integrity of the several Balkan States 
should be entered into. 

12. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman 
Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the 
other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule 
should be assured an undoubted security of life and an 
absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous de- 
velopment ; and the Dardanelles should be permanently 
opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of 
all nations under international guarantees. 

13. An independent Polish State should be erected, 
which should include the territories inhabited by indis- 
putably Polish populations, which should be secured a 
free and secure access to the sea, and whose political 
and economic independence and territorial integrity 
should be guaranteed by international covenant. 

14. A general association of nations must be formed 



118 APPENDIX 

under specific covenants for the purpose of affording 
mutual guarantees of political independence and terri- 
torial integrity to great and small States alike. 

An evident principle runs through the whole pro- 
gramme I have outlined. It is the principle of justice 
to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live 
on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, 
whether they be strong or weak. Unless this principle 
be made its foundation, no part of the structure of 
international justice can stand. The people of the 
United States could act upon no other principle, and to 
the vindication of this principle they are ready to de- 
vote their lives, their honor, and everything that they 
possess. 

The moral climax of this, the culminating and final 
war for human liberty, has come, and they are ready to 
put their own strength, their own highest purpose, 
their own integrity and devotion, to the test. 



The Four Great Objects 

President Wilson, again on July 4, 1918, de- 
fined the issue and the aim of the war with a 
force and a conviction that clear the air of all 
doubt and give precision to the aim of diplo- 
matic endeavor as well as to the armies and 
navies and the peoples behind them. 

" There can be but one issue," declared Presi- 



APPENDIX 119 

dent Wilson at Washington's Tomb, Mount 
Vernon, on Independence Day, 1918: 

The settlement must be final. There can be no com- 
promise. No half-way decision would be tolerable. No 
half-way decision is conceivable. 

These are the ends for which the associated peoples 
of the world are fighting, and which must be conceded 
them before there can be peace: — 

First, the destruction of every arbitrary power any- 
where that can separately, secretly and of its single 
choice disturb the peace of the world, or, if it cannot 
be presently destroyed, at the least its reduction to 
virtual impotence. 

Second, the settlement of every question, whether of 
territory or sovereignty, of economic arrangement or 
of political relationship, upon the basis of the free 
acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately 
concerned, and not upon the basis of the material in- 
terest or advantage of any other nation or people which 
may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own 
exterior influence or mastery. 

Third, the consent of all nations to be governed in 
their conduct towards each other by the same principles 
of honor and of respect for the common law of civilized 
society that govern the individual citizens of all modern 
States and in their relations with one another, to the 
end that all promises and covenants may be sacredly 
observed, no private plots or conspiracies hatched, no 
selfish injuries wrought with impunity, and a mutual 



120 APPENDIX 

trust established upon the handsome foundation of a 
mutual respect for right. 

Fourth, the establishment of an organization of peace 
which shall make it certain that the combined power of 
free nations will check every invasion of right, and serve 
to make peace and justice the more secure by affording 
a definite tribunal of opinion to which all must submit, 
and by which every international adjustment that can- 
not be amicably agreed upon by the peoples directly 
concerned shall be sanctioned. 

These great objects can be put into a single sentence: 
What we seek is the reign of law based upon the con- 
sent of the governed and sustained by the organized 
opinion of mankind. 



INDEX 



Adams, Anne, 1 Conservation, 57 

^19r7!V5-96,"";Ka'"^'""' <^»-«t"«-' U. S.. overriding, 
Address to Congress of Jan. 8, Currency bill, 67 

1918, 115 
America's reunion with Great 

Britain, 113 
Ancestry and birth, 1 
Arabic, 84, 95 
Armed neutrality, 102 
Atlanta, Ga., 7 
Augusta, Ga., 3 
Axon, Ellen L., 8 



Banking reform, 67 
Belgium, 93, 106 
Bethmann-Hollweg, 92 
Big business, 56, 60 
Boiling, Edith, 8 
Bosses, 42, 63 
Boy- Ed, 98 

British institutions, 11, 13 
Browning, Oscar, 16 
Bryan, W. J., 106 
Bryn Mawr, 7 

Cabinet, 5 

Capital, combinations of, 55; 

secret processes, 69 
Carranza, 77 
Churchill, Winston, 113 
Civil War, 50 
Clubs, college, 36 
Columbia, S. C, 4 
Competition, 69 
Congress, 6, 11; war and, 

82 
"Congressional Government," 6, 

7, 10, 13, 89 



Democracy, fundamental, 52 

Democratic party, creed, 51; 
New Jersey, 41 ; original prin- 
ciple, 50 

Dernburg, 98 

Derry, J. T., 3 

Diaz, Porfirio, 73 

"Division and Reunion," 17 

Dumba, Dr., 98 

Education, 3; university ideal, 

30 
Elective system in universities, 

29 

Essays, 18 

Europe, American non-inter- 
vention in, 86 

European war, American initial 
feeling, 83; conditions shap- 
ing Wilson's policv, 82; set- 
tlement, 118; Wilson's ad- 
dress of April 2, 1917, 95-96, 
102-105 

Executive prerogative, 43 

Federal Reserve Banks, 67 
Federal Trade Commission, 

68 
First book, 6, 7, 10, 13, 

39 
Ford, H. J., 67 
Ford Peace Conference, 85 
Fourteen points, 115 



121 



122 



INDEX 



Gait, Mrs. Norman, 8 

German-Americans, 84 

Germany, American declaration 
of war against, 102; in- 
trigues, 98; professions and 
conduct, 92, 97-98 

Governorship, 40 

"Group electives," 31 

Harris, Wilson, 65, 68, 73 
Health, 4, 7 
Historical writings, 16 
" History of the American Peo- 
ple," 16 
Huerta, 75 
Hughes, C. E., 99 
" Human man," 24, 25 
Humanity, 58, 70 

Income tax, federal, 66 
Interlocking directorships, 60, 

68 
Intervention in Mexico, 77, 80 

Johns Hopkins University, 7, 
10 

Kruger, Paul, 75 

League of Nations, 109 
League to Enforce Peace, 90, 

91 
Lecture system in college, 32 
Lincoln, Abraham, vii, 3, 22, 23, 

26 
Literary work, 9 
Literature, 18 
Lloyd George, David, 115 
Lusitarda, 83, 84, 90, 94, 95, 



Madero, Francisco, 76 
Martine, J. E., 42 
Mental bent, 6 

"Mere Literature," 18, 20, 21, 
33 



Message to Congress, 66 
Mexico, 72, 73 
Monopolies, 51, 54, 62, 68 
Monroe Doctrine, 87 
Mount Vernon address, 119 
Munitions, 106 

Neutrality, 88, 89, 91 

" New Freedom, The," 52 

New Jersey, governorship, 40; 

reforms, 42, 46; senatorship, 

42 
Niagara conference, 76 
Note of Dec. 20, 1916, 91-92 

Pacifism, 85 

Pan- Americanism, 77 

Patience, x, 96, 100, 102 

Peace Conference, 111 

People, government of, 49, 62, 

53 
Political writings, 6, 7, 10 
Politics in New Jersey, 40 
Preceptorial system, 33 
Preparedness, 98 
Presidential election of 1912, 49, 

65 
Presidential election of 1916, 97, 

99 
Primaries, direct, 45 
Princeton University, 4, 8, 9; 

club system, 36; Graduate 

School, 37; presidency of 

Wilson, 28 
Protectionism, 49, 51 
Public Utilities Commission, 

45 

Radicalism, 69, 71 
Republican party, 50 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 52, 66, 88, 
93; control of monopolies. 



Scholarship, 33, 35 
Smith, James, 42 
Socialism, 69, 71 



INDEX 



123 



South American states, 76 
Speech of May 27, 1916, 90 
" Slate, The," 14 
Staunton, Va., 1 
Steel, 61 

Steubenville, O., 1 
Stone, W. J., 107 
Stupidity, 64 
Submarines. See U-boats 

Taft, W. H., 51 
Tariflf, 51, 58, 66 
"Too proud to fight," 90 
Trusts, 69 



U-boats, 84, 96 

U. S. Steel Corporation, 61 

Universities in America, 29 

Villa, 77 
Von Papen, 98 

War aims, 115 

Washington, George, vii, 86; 

" Life of Washington," 17 
Wilson, James, 1 
Wilson, Joseph R., 1 
Woodrow, Janet, 2 
Woodrow, Thomas, 2 



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